Michael’s grumpy world commentary weblog.
Apple, you can pay me by cheque.
I think you should pay me. I am sitting in the Air Canada lounge awaiting my departure to Vancouver and Hong Kong, and a stream of travellers are stopping by to admire, look at, and weigh my MacBook Air, and to ask how I am liking it.
I am saying nice things, because I mean them. $200 an hour, shall we say, and 5% of every Air sold as a result, plus 5% for every Windows-to-Mac convert?
Wired this month writes about Apple as “Evil/Genius”. Apple’s behaviour (meaning, Steve Jobs’s) is evil. But the company is genius. A strong technology-driven vision, implemented without “design by committee”: that is why I am now using my iMac and my MacBook Air, and the Vista PC is idle. Here’s my MacBook (click for larger):
The move to Mac is faster then I would have expected, and the learning curve is easy. My only problem is syncing my Blackberry: the sync process is entirely unintuitive, RIMs app is buggy, and adding The Missing Sync, although an improvement, has not totally helped - I still get double, triple, quadruple appointments.
Anyway, that is RIMs fault, not Apple’s. Apple so far is a pleasure, certainly as far as the hardware and the OS are concerned.
Not only that. I went to the Apple Store today to pick up a USB Ethernet dongle. I have several, but it appears that only Apple’s own adapter works (there’s the evil again). The buying experience, however, was fabulous. Retail done right.
I gave the shop assistant, sorry, the Apple Genius, my credit card and he swiped it through his handheld terminal. “You can pack the adapter away now”, he said. He then asked: “Is this you?”, and showed me my (correct) details. “Would you like the invoice sent to your dot mac account?”. I had not even identified myself, but Apple identified me - perhaps using the credit card and name, or name and town. “Sure”, I replied. “You are done now - bye”. The entire process took just a few seconds. No queueing at the front desk or waiting for a free cash register. When I checked my email a few seconds later (the Apple store has free wireless access), the invoice was sitting there waiting for me. Integrated corporate databases, clever workflow, intelligent design: all very inspiring. Why isn’t everyone else doing this?
Danish women have, I read today, won the right to go topless in Copenhagen’s pools.
This is of course as it should be. Denmark lives in the 21st century (as opposed to, say, Iran and the USA, both of which appear to live a few centuries ago).
What I do not understand, however, is the only objection, which was voiced by lifeguards, who apparently said they would now “have problems knowing what to hold when rescuing swimmers in difficulties”. I have no idea why on earth they would have this problem.
I see that “Fitwa”, Mr Geert Wilders’ movie about Islam, has been pulled by Liveleak, the web site that was hosting it, due to threats. This is most regrettable.
Mr Wilders is one of the Netherlands’ least tolerant politicians; a right-wing anti-immigrant stance is his platform. His movie, therefore, is much as you would expect. Fear-inducing shots of bad things done by Muslims, and of extremists, interspersed with shots of the Koran’s more violent verses.
The link is tenuous. Yes, sure, many modern terrorists are Muslim. But to blame the Koran is as silly as it would be to pull quotes from the Old Testament - there are many similar quotes - and blame Timothy McVeigh and similar wackos on those. All religious books are nonsense. But they do not cause terrorism.
If the Koran is hate speech, then so is the Bible. Banning them would be unrealistic to say the least - and contrary to free speech. Similarly, Mr Wilders’ movie is exaggerated fearmongering, but he has the right to say what he wants, and he makes the valid point that a religion should not be used to justify violence.
This is a strange story, because everyone is wrong. Wilders is wrong to blame everything on Islam. Extremists are wrong to use religion to manipulate people. Anyone who interprets a religion literally is wrong. The people who threatened Liveleak staff are wrong. Liveleak’s decision to pull the movie is wrong - although I can understand why they would have.
This is a good example of how freedom of speech means the freedom to say bad things. Wilders as well as the Koran are allowed, whether we like them or not.
Several laws of physics that they did not teach me at university:
Keep these in mind when packing your photography bag for the day. Save on everything - be like an astronaut and save on every gram you can. Your back will thank you.
Every single time, this year.
This is what I carry in my bag every day. No, this is just a tiny bit of what I carry. This is just the “cables and accessories” section.
This includes:
And finally, last but not least:
So does a monopod make a difference?
These pictures look alike. Number 1 was taken with a monopod. 40mm lens, 1/15th second. Number 2, same settings, but purely handheld. Click on each to see unedited detail.
Now tell me a monopod does not make a difference.
Handheld, 5D, Manual, 1/125th, flash lit (bounce), f/4 on a 24-70 f/2.8 lens, 200 ISO. Not easy: heavy camera and lens means shaking.
So far, so good: I have switched entirely to the MacBook Air as my main machine.
Sure, my 20″ iMac sits in front of me at home, and my Windows PC behind me just in case, and on my work desk I have the excellent Ubuntu desktop (I really want the Cube desktop switching effect on the Mac). I also still have the Vista laptop (which by the way is a Lenovo, and Lenovos all seem to break nowadays. The case is cracked, and everyone at work has cracked cases or intermittent hardware problems with their Lenovos too).
So I have a lot of different PCs - in fact I use every current major OS platform (XP, Vista, Ubuntu and MacOS X Leopard) on a daily basis That may give my opinion some weight.
So I will let my actions speak: the Air is now my main machine.
I had bought it as a travel machine, but I just do not want to stop using it. It is small and light, which makes it a pleasure to use. But so does the bright sharp screen, even though it is only a 1280×800 screen. The light sensor and the backlit keyboard also add to the enjoyment I get from using this machine.
Drawbacks? Well, I would like a full keyboard - I miss the PgUp/PgDn keys in particular. I would like the single USB port to be easier to access. I would like another USB port, come to that, and an Ethernet port - shame they left that off. A DVD drive would be good too. But have I actually missed these features other than ‘in theory’? No. It is amazing how much more important the tiny size and great design are that the lack of features I do not actually normally use.
What do I normally us my PC for?
On my laptop, which I use around the house, on trips, and at the office all day, I do what most other office people do. I get email (Entourage; see previous post); I browse the web (Mozilla); I write documents, spreadsheets and presentations (MS Office:Mac 2008, NeoOffice and Mac iWork). All this is great on the Air.
What do I not do on it? Listen to music (an 80 GB HDD that is actually 75 GB is not large enough for my iTunes music; the “60″ GB $$D is certainly too small), do photo editing (screen real estate and speed), or anything else particularly heavy. For that I have my iMac, and for the Windows specific tasks I have the XP PC or Parallels.
The one thing I cannot get to work is the very badly implemented iMac synchronisation. The interface is super-unintuitive and I keep getting double addresses and calendar appointments. Add Entourage syncing to that mix (even less intuitive, with its hidden settings) and it gets even worse. Then add a Blackberry and you have a Greek Mythology sized nightmare.
But that is hardly the Air’s fault. The Air is a revelation, more than I thought it would be. Zen.
