Virtual Reality

The Chicago Virtual Reality Meetup group was founded last March (2014) and had its first meeting in June. Gotta love being a ten-minute drive from the meeting place for a change. I love Meetup and have gone to Drupal meetings downtown and out in St. Charles. WordPress meetup in Elmhurst. But to meet in Glen Ellyn was wonderful. Extra bonus points for seeing where the Cubicle Ninjas hide out. I'd first heard of them during my job hunt five years ago but never had the opportunity to meet anyone. Josh Farkas has been a great host and they have a terrific facility with powerful workstations (Mac and Windows) by which to power their Oculus Rift development kits. (They have the original DK1 and two DK2 kits.)

The Ninjas are working on an application for virtual reality environments. I don't know how much more I can say about it but it ties in nicely with my avocational side. Combined with my interest in Second Life, this Meetup group held high expectations for me. I geeked it and wore my old Atari Jaguar shirt, which got noticed. Virtual Reality headgear first got mentioned back in the early 90s and the Jaguar console was hyped as the beneficiary of that technology. It all disappeared as quickly as it bloomed. Twenty years later and with much more powerful computers, we have the money of Facebook backing the Oculus Rift as well as other big-money players throwing in. The shirt was a reminder how these things can fade away.

Josh expressed a lot of enthusiasm for my Second Life expertise and we've been talking about getting together since that first June meeting. It happened, kinda, last December 23 after I got off of work and hustled over to their offices. After fiddling with settings for twenty minutes, I was operating my son's old avatar, using the beta viewer that supports the Oculus Rift. I tried to take a picture but that functionality is not available. I have links to videos. The immersion was impressive: The framing parts of the User Interface (UI) floated just above and below and to the sides so that you faced the full three-dimensional aspects of whatever SL sim you visited without their distraction. With the headgear, you have no view of your hands and therefore need to experiment with placing your left hand over the WASD keys to move around. It took me a few minutes to get the mouse cursor to appear in my view and then I was able to work the menus and click on items.

About five weeks later, I visited again for a longer exploration of Prehistorica and some other Oculus-friendly sites. It's pretty exciting what is going on.

Time passed quickly but it was enough for me to feel like Linden Lab has done a good job of utilizing the OR. I want more! And Josh has promised that I can visit on my own to use one of their stations. I've also tempted him into taking charge of that avatar to begin his own explorations. My feeling is that VR and applications like SL are a major frontier for doing business in the near future when OR headsets (and competitors' versions) go commercial.

I am getting ready to explore High Fidelity as well.

New Musical Horizons Via Sonos

When we moved into our house twenty years ago, I imagined using yards and yards of cable to set up speakers in our family room on one end of the house to the stereo system located in the living room a fair-sized dining room away. A few innocuous holes drilled into the floor in a corner would keep everything hidden, running the wires along the basement ceiling. The basement is quasi-finished, but this was not a solution my darling wife would accept. So we never had music in in the living room unless it played on the television or off a separate music system. We talked for years about getting a wireless system, but the reviews of such systems were not promising.

For Christmas 2014, we gave ourselves a Sonos system. I went to several stores and asked questions, concerned about being able to retire our CD Player and hundreds of CDs over time but to be able to use it with a new system. We needed a component called Connect that would tie into the Players (not called speakers) and the CD Player. The system cost around $1,200. Considering we hadn't bought speakers in more than thirty years (Bose is all it's cracked up to be, although too rich for us to adopt in this scenario), and no new components in a dozen years, we didn't consider this a splurge in any way. Jessie came along and chose the top-of-the-line spea--er, players; one for each room. We could have bought eight inconspicuous players (Player 1) and spread them all over the house, but there's greater quality in the Player 3s we chose. We didn't go with the Playbar or Sub, either, since we don't need to be knocked out of our chairs by explosions on the television. Or add another $700 to the cost.

The setup is not well explained in the manual that comes with the system even though it's very straightforward once you've survived it. You plug the Connect module into your home Wireless system via a LAN cable. It adopts your wireless network. When you plug in a Player, it sends a ping to your app and you name it. The app allows you to play different music on each Player or to combine them to play the same thing. The app recognizes music services (anything you have installed: Spotify, Pandora, Slacker, Calm, etc. as well as Amazon and Google accounts that store your digital music) as well as Internet Radio. This latter took me completely by surprise and has been a wonderful source of discovery for us these past few months. You have at least two dozen genres of music with dozens of stations for each category. Yes, a lot of them would love to have you subscribe but if you can handle the ads--it's radio the way an old-timer like me understands it--you can change channels, endlessly once an ad has worn out its welcome.

While we actually knew that the system is run via a mobile app, it didn't occur to us until I had it set up that Jessie didn't have a smartphone and her three-year old Nook couldn't handle the Sonos app. So her Christmas bonus was a Kindle Fire HD 7 and they lived happily ever after. Another interesting thing to note: Windows Phone doesn't have a free Sonos app, but something called Phonos. It lets me do thumbs up/down with Pandora, something Sonos app doesn't do, and just about anything else it does. You should test it using Free Trial, which is a nice aspect of all Windows Phone apps.

What we thought we were buying was a replacement for quite a few electronic components: Amp/Receiver and speakers in a cabinet in our living room. Now there's just a pedestal with the Sonos Player on it. (I'll get them over to Best Buy or somewhere for recycling when the weather improves.) Now for the first time in twenty years, we can walk from the family room through the dining room or kitchen and emerge in the living room listening to the same music. The icing on the cake was the vast resevoir of musical services the Internet provides. The real irony of it all is that with so much new music to listen to, we rarely go through the effort of turning on the CD Player--the app doesn't do that although it does have a Line-In option for listening to the CDP once you've chosen a CD and turned it on. (We could have saved $300--the cost of a Player 2 by skipping the CD connection of the Connect. I had hoped, although no one promised it, that the Connect would also work with our SmartTV but that requires the $699 Playbar.)

As I pondered in a previous post ripping our CDs seems very worthwhile with the accessibility to digital media so simple.

Update on Galaxy and other Tech

So last May 2014 was my previous post about my Galaxy Tab 3. I made my peace with it last Fall when I just paid out my AT&T Next account and pulled it off the data line. It had come perilously close to tipping me past my 2GB limit the previous month, so I'd had enough of it wily ways. Now if it can't get a datafeed, it actually lets me know that wifi has stopped. That doesn't happen very often, either, making me suspicious of its inability to hold onto a wifi signal when a sim card is present. Regardless, I feel so much more secure about it.

What is irksome, of course, is having gone a year in monthly Next payments on the tablet, I still owed $135. At the time, I suppose, a Galaxy Tab 4 wasn't going for $150, but it is now.

I used it at work running our conference mobile app to check on how speakers and sessions were configuring, running the content management system on my workstation. The picture at right shows Qualtrics software running on my main screen, with Outlook on my work laptop, and the tablet below. We use Qualtrics to create our online surveys.

It also has become my reading medium, and now that Jessie has a new tablet, we can share our Kindle accounts and justify buying books that we will both read. We also replaced Bose speakers that were 30+ years and starting to sound ragged with a Sonos system. This wireless sound system provides us, for the first time, with music in both main living areas of our home. (It's also why Jessie needed to update her three-year old Nook to a Kindle Fire HD 7 since she needs the Sonos App to run the system.) We wanted to be able to connect to our CD player and that has been accomplished. Goodbye to the Sony receiver/amp bought 15-20 years ago, since we now how what amounts to Sirius FM in terms of access to Internet Radio, not to mention my growing digital music libraries on Google Play and Amazon, as well as Pandora (and Spotify if we were so inclined). We bought the Player 5 speakers, which are a pretty good equivalent to the old Bose speakers and definitely fill our living room and TV room with plenty of fine sound. Expanding to other rooms with smaller speaker systems is possible, as well.

I have a bunch of apps I would love to explore but just haven't worked out the time: several meditation-guidance apps (Meditation Helper, ZazenMeditation Timer, and Insight Timer) and music apps (Pocketband, Oscilab, Caustic). Guitar Tuna works on my Nokia 1020 Windows phone as well as the Galaxy. (Yes, I replaced my not-so-smartphone with a camera, er, the 1020, which may have run its course in terms of what Nokia is presently offering, but with Win8.1 it does all I need and takes amazing photos. I will ride this horse until it crumbles in my paw.)

Some thoughts on music media

I am listening to an MP3 of Supertramp's "Classics" and remembering their concert up at Alpine Valley in the late 70s with Jessie and my brother Roger. One vivid memory is when the giant screen behind the band projected this image of a commuter train embarking out of its station and onto its route, sped up to match perfectly with the band vamping in the closing three minutes of "Crime of the Century." Of course, I'm aging myself. It was a simpler time: the vinyl album was like a photo taken to remind you of the vacation you'd gone on. It wasn't going to last forever. But neither does the memory unless you have something to prompt it out of the unkempt storage of infrequently exercised brain cells.

While I cannot claim the breadth of experience that my mother has, I have been through a lot of transitions in the technology of the artistic efforts of the musicians of the past century and more. We were at a few stores this weekend and couldn't find a CD of classical music let alone any selections from Christopher Hogwood's Academy of Ancient Music. Why were we even in a store considering buying such outdated media as CDs? you may well ask. We didn't miss the train, folks, we hesitate for good reasons. How many times should we buy this particular piece of music? we ask in reply.

I jumped on the technology train and began recording my vinyl albums onto cassette tapes. (Yeah, I pretty much dodged 8-track after experiencing Roger's adaptation. He didn't invest too much in cartridges but it was the player in his car that really made him kick himself. My bad choice in failed technology avenues was Quadraphonic Recordings. And I really started with my 8th grade graduation gift of a small reel-to-reel tape recorder with a patch cord for a transistor radio!) I went after that practice with gusto, transcribing at least 200 albums to that format. And just like the way businesses adapt to the dukes and jabs of technology, I found stores that sold and traded "like new" albums, so I had a way to recycle my vinyl collection and build up a formidable collection of tapes.

Well, a fire in our apartment building did a pretty nasty job on the classic vinyls I had stored in the water-logged basement, while my cassettes survived. At least until it became clear that the CD was the Next Big Thing. (Let's not discuss the whole idea of it being an incorruptible or indestructible medium as originally pitched, nor about the pros and cons of the quality of the performance.) When it became clear that cassette players were joining reel-to-reel and 8-track players in museums, I jumped ship. I bought a converter plug for my computer and fully intended on transferring the tapes to CD. But that "spare time" in which I converted vinyl to cassette seemed to have disappeared. (Sure, I'll name names: Zach and Alex.) I deemed my time to be of sufficient worth that I would proceed to purchase CDs to replace the "classics" in my cassette collection.

The first problem in this transition: some of my favorite bands--Ozark Mountain Daredevils, for instance--were pre-CD and obscure. Procrastination, however, became my friend. Diligent searching discovered that the Daredevils had bought back their tapes and released their albums on CD. If all you can think of is "Jackie Blue," in regard to this wonderful country rock band, go to Spotify and look up "Beauty in the River," "Country Girl," and "Gypsy Forest" for the true, haunting melodies of an All-Time Under-Appreciated Band. Even more obscure than OMD, was a Chicago-based band called Wilderness Road, whose first of only two albums was "Wilderness Road," a western opera about a bounty man. You can find some of the songs in digital format but not all of them. I found the website of one of the band leaders and was able to get a limited edition CD that could be my most valued musical possession besides my guitars. What's particularly special about this is my cassette recording ends abruptly because the vinyl album had become so worn that it skipped at the end and the needle would lift off.

The second problem in this transition is cost: simply buying "Best of" albums handled a fair amount of purchasing songs for the second or third time around. "Jackie Blue," which I loathe, but is considered the peak of OMD's creativity would be on a Best of. I was very disappointed, for instance, in having "Let's Get Drunk and Screw" on a collection of Jimmie Buffet's best, while not seeing "It's My Job" or "Incommunicado." Obviously, I was not consulted when the compilation was made. Bruce Springsteen has a song similar to "It's My Job" that I have on a bootleg cassette that I cannot find on Spotify. (As far as that goes, look on the Blue Oyster Cult lists for songs from their "Imaginos" album, no longer in print in the US and the only BOC album not on CD. I made a special order of a Euro version of it, since I consider it among their best albums--the Bouchard brothers left the band, and I assume there's an Issue about rights to the songs. I've never heard them perform songs from "Imaginos" in concert.)

The fact that I've built up a sizable collection of CDs, enough so that I recycled the cases and put them all in large, unwieldy leather CD albums, I am up the creek in terms of doing some kind of recycling at Half-Price Books or the CD Recycle store. It so happens that spare time is opening up and I can ponder ripping the CDs ... for "archive purposes" and dispensing them to all of my mobile platforms. Now the problem becomes one of tracking down those outlier songs in MP3 format and adding them to the collection. Do I pay $1.29 each for the three songs not among those considered the Best from a particular band, and go ahead with $6.99 for the album and deal with redundancy or songs for which I don't particularly care?
It's an interesting dilemma.

At this stage in life, why bother? I've already mentioned Spotify, although my knowledge regarding the depth of the Spotify library grew from a year's subscription, the lowest fee-based setting. (It's the one that doesn't share out to mobile platforms or allow any downloading.) I have also found Pandora an excellent choice for listening on my tablet and when I want to explore the wild blue yonder of new music, I like Slacker's stations. All free and much like listening to radio, even with repetitious ads. When I can get fairly focused playlists for free, or very specific focus for a fee, why bother with the labor of ripping CD archives?

That gets into philosophy and that's a topic for my other personal journal as opposed to this, my professional journal, which looks at how I use tools. It's my blog; I make the distinctions.

Is there an App for Handling Ambivalence?

I've been wanting to write more about my Galaxy 3 Tab 7 but I wanted to provide screenshots and that seems to be a drawback. I have tried the various suggestions as well as read the comments about screen captures on Androids using the latest version of the OS. I am more likely to turn off my tab than capture a screen. This review will have to go without photos since it would be rather ironic to take pictures of the tab using my Windows Phone wouldn't it?

It has taken me longer than I'd like to admit to learn how to walk the Android tightrope on some key operations. A couple of months ago, I noticed I couldn't get my wifi to log into my home account after noticing it wouldn't log onto my work account. So I reset it and once it was running again, saw all of the downloaded apps were gone. I assumed there was some kind of backup going on. Google Play did acknowledge that I'd downloaded them but I had to re-install them. I'm feeling like Samsung has a deal with AT&T to try to get me to jump my data limit by forcing me to back up while unable to use wifi or to download everything again when it's restored. This is not a game I appreciate. I've learned to make sure when I'm in a Wifi environment that the tab is using Wifi or I restart it--I don't need to reset it, thank goodness. Sometimes a Widget won't respond and I just go, well, that was nice but it's not the end of my life.

Another annoying aspect was how my glasses thwarted it's Smart Screen application. If I'm reading an e-book, whether in Kindle or e-Pub mode, the screen goes dim or actually goes away. Kindle is a little more forgiving when I touch the screen to let it know I'm there, whereas e-Pub wants to start other functions. I turn off Smart Screen when I want to read, it got worse until I reset the display time to 30 minutes. I don't usually read longer than that at lunch or on the commute. Of course, now the screen will stay on longer than needed and could wear out the battery faster unless I turn it off.

So, I've become habituated to turning off the tab when I stop using it and to checking for the wifi icon to ensure it's on before doing anything that may require data. That's life with a tablet, I suppose. Those are two very big strikes against what otherwise has been a very useful alternative to my IQ-challenged Windows 7.1 smartphone. It goes without saying that reading books or viewing any app on a bigger screen is preferable to my phone. But I really am very interested in looking at a Nokia win8 phone with a bigger screen. Samsung seems very overrated to me. I'm looking forward to when I can drop the data line and just use the tablet when I am in a wifi situation.

The one failure that puts me off on future Samsung/Android purchases, however, is the inability of its Blue Tooth to play well with my SanteFe's bluetooth. Being able to access such a rich variety of media sources would be terrific. The car is 2010 and it connects very well with our older Samsung phones but I can't believe that newer BT wouldn't be able to reach back and work with our car. Unacceptable.

I have quite a few apps installed now, but very few I actually use that would score in favor of a Android v Windows 8 comparison since both OSs work with Pandora, Slacker, Netflix, YouTube and so on. What immediately comes to mind are the two Second Life apps, Lumiya and SLGo, that let me visit my virtual home on the road without lugging my laptop. The former has a very different interface that has kept me from using it more often. The latter involves either a subscription or pay-as-you-go service and I'm not sure I want to add that to my expenses.

Nothing is easy with apps. I have purchased movies and music through different stores, so of course, I can't access them from just one app, nor download them so I don't spend data to watch them. It's very likely true whether I have an Apple or Windows product, but there does seem to be a strange disconnect using Google apps in an Android environment that don't seem to want to play well together. This was not a Windows trait they needed to emulate.

I've let this post slide so long now, that I am going to post it rather than continue to polish and revise it as new things come up. I just can't get all that worked up about it.

What's Next? Indeed!

Last Friday was the last straw for my Samsung Focus Flash phone. I was marveling over how nice our new app for the upcoming Annual Conference looked in HTML 5. It made last year's app look like something from DOS (see below comparisons, screenshots from desktop of workstation running the web app). I was clicking through our Schedule app and found when I clicked on the Speakers link, it failed to pull data on them. When I checked the same app--it's a web url, not a true app--on my workstation, the links went through. The implication was clear to me: somewhere along the html trail, my $.99 Windows Phone's incapacity to update to Win 7.5 was to blame. (This was confirmed by our support people at Tripbuilder.) I needed a new phone!

I already knew that I was not close enough to the end of our AT&T contract to qualify for an upgrade. I checked on the AT&T Web store and there was this new AT&T Next option. It basically comes down to renting a device on a new line grafted to the old contract for 20 months. After 12 months, you can trade your device in for a new one for another 20 months. The remaining 8 months of "rental" payments are dropped. Or you can go the 20 months and then you just continue with the services. What's nice is that you still have qualified for the Next options, so you trade in the device and work it from there.

Suddenly, I'm studying up on the Nokia phones, which I posted about awhile ago. I knew they've been bought by Microsoft. The Here Maps have been touted as superior to even Google Maps. The wonderful camera abilities are certainly welcome. Windows 8 will handle HTML 5 with aplomb. This looked like a no-brainer. The Nokia Lumia 925, brand new with aluminum housing, was offered at $21/mo., while the 920 with 8GB, was offered at $15/mo. With the cost of the new line, a new data package, and insurance, it was closer to $25/mo. added to our current phone invoice. Yes, there was that one line to the defunct WinPhone that would expire in April 2014, but nothing can be done. A contract is a contract.

With that hesitation, I considered an ASUS Windows 8 tablet, but that was $25/mo, plus the $10/mo insurance. The one neat wrinkle was the way it could rewire our overall plan: Jessie's phone would be granted unlimited texting (as if we ever came close to our previous limit!), and my WinPhone and tablet would share 2GB of data service. I've barely gotten close to .75GB let alone the full 3GB I had with the previous plan, so this looked worthy of consideration. It let me keep a phone that was very serviceable in a number of smartphone ways and gave me something I could take to conference and on vacation that could work with the conference app--my overriding concern for making a change--rather than my laptop.

Guess what? Besides the fact that a more reasonably priced solution was available, I balked at using a Windows 8 tablet. I like that OS on a phone, but I've head a lot of grief over Win8 on computers. I went back to the store, knowing that if all else failed, a Nokia Lumia 920 would be a major improvement over the Samsung FF. But I looked around at the AT&T Next deals on other tabs and found the Galaxy 3 Tab 7. The monthly rate was $15, same as for the NL920. I'd keep the phone and I'd be learning one of the two top operating systems in the mobile device market. I'd be able to help a much larger group of ABA members at conference with their apps. It all fell together nicely. And Samsung gets another chance!

As I described earlier, I will share 2GB between the two smart devices (my other choice was 4GB for another $10/mo.). I have been very good with doing major downloading via wifi rather than AT&T with the phone for 16 months now. Granted there aren't as many apps out for Windows as there are for Android and yes, even fewer since so many won't run on Win7.1. What's really sweet is that I've been able to accomplish a lot of downloading under both conditions, because with the old plan's billing date, I am almost obliged to indulge myself as I will start with a clean slate after just five more days! (Half a Gig already and rolling!) Once I've got my essentials and "give-a-try apps" onboard, I will buckle down and stay out of the Play Store.

I'll have more to write about as I get myself up to speed on this new environment. Needless to say, as I am composing this post, I am listening to Pandora and wearing a Cheshire grin. (I did not, however, compose this post on the tablet.)

Previous posts about my Samsung Focus Flash or in some other way related:

Using TripBuilder's Phone App

My Next Phone

And that's why it's called a smart phone

A Life in Clicks

It has to be close to 15 years ago that I was introduced to the Logitech Marble Mouse. Not the one with the blue ball, but the older, flatter one with the red ball that is no longer in production. It took less than two days to become completely enamored of this mouse's advantages: my arm could pretty much stay still and my thumb and eyes conspired to draw when needed or otherwise navigate the workstation screen. I have a pretty good idea that Logitech's device preserved my right arm from carpel tunnel syndrome (CTS) over the years of heavy use, at home as well as work.

Yes, I spend a lot of time in front of a computer. I've already written about and shown pictures of my home system. Presently, I spend my weekdays on a Lenovo Pentium Dual Core workstation that uses Windows XP. Ten years ago that would be considered the state-of-the-art OS and few PCs could touch it for performance. Maybe not the same as cat years or dog years, but computers age on a quicker scale than humans. Software groomed for use on Windows 7 and 8 has no mercy on an OS like XP. Or on the person using it, who often resorts to looking at his smartphone while waiting for the system to complete some arcane process that has frozen the screen.

It's slow. I'm back to opening Photoshop and going for coffee. I could take the elevator and buy it 18 floors away, and still find it settling in. Running with Outlook on and two browsers open is a challenge to my patience when I'm used to my laptop at home blazing away.

With time measured in such slow motion, life becomes measurable in clicks. The question to ask, particularly when you've reached my ripe age, is have I been given an unlimited number of clicks? I've been using a computer for close to three decades. The number of clicks I've performed is one of those rare times when "myriad" is not an exaggeration in measuring them. Consequences exist for those who click beyond their limitations. CTS is only one of them, I'm sure. I can feel strains in my wrist and along my arm, pinging my elbow and worming its way to my shoulder.

You would think of all people who live by clicks, developers would be among those who wage a constant fight against clicks. A Web developer certainly knows that the usability of her site rises and falls with the number of clicks it takes to get to a page. When I started my present job, one of my main duties is as Webmaster for our section's site. My war on clicks began. I can cut down the clicks it takes to get to our pages but the tools I use don't share my goals.

For instance, with a slow OS, I find myself facing this message: "You chose to end the nonresponsive program, ______." If Microsoft truly wanted me to send the report, maybe it would take into consideration the number of clicks it costs for me to do them this service. (See the next two graphics.) Maybe those boxes could just fade after a number of seconds that I am given a chance to determine with the Control Panel (or at least the administrators at the ABA).

 Easy to kick Microsoft for any number of ways it adds clicks to my life. It's like kicking a pigeon.

A company that ought to know better is Adobe. I've mentioned some of these tools before. After a recent major upgrade of their CQ5 content management system, I find it appalling how little regard their developers have for trying to limit clicks for its users. The image below shows how their editing window opens up each and every time I need to make adjustments or to create a new page. Because they limit me to an editing window 12 lines deep, I need to click on each side of that box to expand it to see as much of my page as they allow.

Another editing box that am obliged to work with is how we tag content with metadata. This box works vertically as well as horizontally to provide a list of the controlled vocabulary that goes into tagging our content. To adequately tag a paper submitted by a member to our digital assets manager (DAM) takes 36 clicks. Over the three months of our Midwinter Meetings, I will post close to 400 papers. More than 14,000 clicks. I find myself using my middle finger to click sometimes ... to save wear and tear on my pointer.

Any number of solutions to this unnecessary excess of clicking comes to mind. I could copy and paste tags, or since I'm doing a batch of 20-40 papers that share the same tags, a way to process them in multiples shouldn't be that difficult to program. We're not talking about a brand new product, but one that is in version 5 and charges a beefy licensing fee for it use. Users have had plenty of time to register complaints but nothing has been done. Adobe has plenty of competition that does these things more efficiently, too. (So, yes, our IS department shoulders the culpability in my inevitable decline toward CTS. I've mentioned it to them once or twice now.)

I could mention any number of other ways that my burden of clicks could be eased by Webmasters and our IS department, but these are sufficient examples. 

I should hope by now that you have been inspired to consider ways in which you are wasting clicks on software or at favorite Websites. (As always, feel free to comment!) We pay for these things with more than dollars. We also pay in clicks.

My Windows Phone @ Nine Months

I've been calling my phone a retarded Windows Phone. Let's get the slander placed correctly, its the Samsung Focus Flash (SGH-i677 Windows Phone 7.5). It's the "7.5" that sticks in my craw as I cannot update it past Windows 7.1. Without 7.5, a number of appealing apps will not function: Pandora, Spotify, Jack of Tools (compass, altimeter, speedometer, etc.), this is just painful ... I've already bitched and moaned about this, so let's move on.

I have also mentioned how it has been a great help at work in dealing with mobile apps for our conference last November. I did look at iPhone and Android versions of our app with a good deal of envy, but I have hope that HTML 5-based mobile apps will level the playing field.

I have found some great apps:

Evernote. I wanted a "notepad" for remembering my library card number, being able to pull out favorite quotes, and the usual ad hoc note taking. Saved to the Cloud, I can upload notes from my PC to Evernote and have them available on my phone. Check out the website, it's a very nice free app.

I've already mentioned Klick and Accurate Tuner for use with my guitar, but needless to say, they've  made me appreciate the phone.

AmazonKindle has been another addic--useful app in getting (mostly) free e-books to read. It's a very interesting marketplace, to say the least. Another e-reader app that is very interesting, Legimi, appears to be a work of Polish developers as I see a lot of Polish links. Nonetheless, I found great downloads of Robert E. ("Conan the Barbarian") Howard works that my cousin says I must read. He would disapprove of me taking advantage of getting these works free but at least I am reading them as instructed.

Jessie bought me a Seattle Sports Dry Dock Landing Pad (see right, photo compliments of REI) that has two velcro bands that promise to allow me to mount it on my bike. I have a couple of free apps that will allow me to have a speedometer that I can look at while riding (BikeSpeedometer) and Cycle Log, a "cycle diary," which has allowed me to record average speeds, elevation changes and trip time and length. The latter worked without being mounted so I can look at it but it will be very nice to use these apps when biking season begins. (I notice that reviewers have kicked Cycle Log for less than stellar accuracy in handling altitude and distance. I may look into better apps when the season allows me to do comparisons.)

A good friend has me revisiting playing MechWarrior, which requires the use of 10-sided die. I immediately began a search of the apps, finding a half dozen of them that give you a wide variety of game dice (d4, d6, d8, d10, d12 and d20). The Dicebox RPG app from Bonehead Software was by far the best implementation of what I hoped for. Let the video tell my tale.

 

As you can see, one can roll the dice holding the phone and the dice
are visible to anyone playing. (In our game use, the total of the dice isn't important.)
None of the other apps came close to this one.

Using TripBuilder's Phone Apps

Mobile Web version
of the finished app. The
iPhone and Android
versions were gorgeous
in comparison.

Last June I was directed to work with TripBuilder about creating phone apps for our Conference in November. This had been done two years before with not a lot of enthusiasm by attendees but we felt that maybe there would be more people using smartphones this year. New territory for me, but the people at TB were great. They gave us a deadline for having a substantial amount of data flowing into their Web-based content management system (CMS) for handling the various functions for scheduling, listing speakers and attendees, creating surveys, and so forth.

I assume that the phone apps business emerged out of TB's original paper-based scheduling and pocket guides to conference cities service. A module providing a guide to the city of Atlanta was also included in the services extended by the apps: iOS (iPhones), Android, BlackBerry, and Web-based mobiles (including Windows phones and tablets) would be created. My main job was to take the logo for our conference and adapt it to numerous sizes and formats for these four applications. Associates of mine would use Excel templates downloaded from the TB CMS to insert data on sessions, speakers, attendees, exhibitors, and sponsors, as well as text for an About page. We could continue to update the CMS via these templates, however, as we got closer to the event, it was better to insert the data on attendees one by one so as to not overwrite notes that early adopters might be adding to their records.

Opening screen for the TripBuilder CMS.

We used the Section's Facebook page, monthly e-Newsletter, and Website to inform members about the apps and how to download them. To every email we sent out regarding the conference in the last weeks leading up to it, we appended a notice about the apps. By the time Conference started we had close to 200 apps downloaded for the branded phones. I could track adoptions via reports provided by the TB CMS. I also saw there had been 800 views of the mobile-based schedules, though we had no way to translate that into unique users. What really told us the apps were a success, however, was when we had more than 100 downloads during the first day of sessions. It was obvious that people were showing off their apps to friends and the friends were liking what they saw.

Graphics were uploaded and stored for use by the TB programmers. You couldn't vary from their precise size requirements by one measly pixel!

This tells me two things: we had done enough promotion to prime the pump for adoption before the conference and the apps were easy enough to learn that the early adopters wanted to show off to whomever they ran into at Conference. It's obvious that this will play well next year, since by the end of Conference we had close to a 50% adoption rate. That translates to having a sponsor and selling banner ads to run on the apps. More artwork for me to upload to their CMS next year but well worth the effort.

During Conference a decision was made to handle session evaluations online. This turned out to be about 24 on the first day, 33 on the second, and 17 on the final half day. Putting these together using our ABA Qualtrics account took about three-and-a-half hours each for the first two days and two hours for the last one, typing in each speaker's name and session titles. Instituting similar surveys via TB's CMS took me all of a half-hour! That's the power of a database-driven application kicking ass. The former set of surveys had to be emailed en masse to the attendees and they had to go from one session to the next in order to ensure they saw a survey for the sessions they attended. I got some email complaints on that!

Building surveys was a breeze with the TB CMS.

 The phone apps, first of all, allowed attendees to create their personal schedule of sessions they wished to attend. So referring to their MyScehdule, they had already eliminated sessions they hadn't attended and were able to press a button for taking the session survey. Needless to say, I'm looking forward to this aspect of the evaulation process next year!

TB is not standing on it's laurels, however. Next year, they will be able to allow our speakers to fill out their own biographies and other data to the TB CMS, which we can download for our own use (print copies, CD files). There will be an app that allows people to fill out forms and actually print out CLE certification documents for attending CLE-approved session. They are coming out with a spin-off application that will use HTML 5 to make the Web-based apps look more like the iOS apps and less like the screenshot elsewhere on this page. This app will be a 365/24/7 social networking tool.

It was great working with the TripBuilder team and I'm looking forward to continuing the relationship.

Google No Longer Avatar Friendly?

I've been struggling in an attempt to recover the Google account for my Oberon Octagon avatar. My Google Docs, Google Calendar and Google + account will also be lost. Six years of productive use, above board board and honest, all lost due to a mistake regarding my birthdate. When I attempted to follow their steps to recover the account, I was denied. I can only conjecture at what I failed to do because no one at Google has seen fit to answer my emails.

Apparently I'm not alone as a blogger I admire greatly is also facing termination of her account. Avatar versus monolithic corporation ... outcome not promising. I've been a very strong evangelist for Google and apps. I'm about to write criticism of their terms of operation using one of their products, which I will continue to recommend.

Payment method not valid? Obviously, it wasn't matching my avatar name. But Google never explained even though I tried to contact them about it.

My personal gmail account is not backed by a credit card for certification of age or any other identification requirement. I find it disappointing that a mistake made in re-entering the birthday for my avatar account caused its closure but was Google going to contact me about my avatar's name not seeming likely to be real? Sometime down this line of reasoning would the profile picture not a be a good enough likeness of a human? (Actually, as you can see in the screenshot below, we're getting close to that actuality.)

What is the problem? Are we taking up too much space on the servers? I am disappointed. It's not like I have paid for the account but I have grown accustomed to having my mail segregated by identity: actual, virtual, business, game. I guess my business model of having a variety of email accounts is faulty.

Google provided a rationale to Botgirl Questi and actually has restored her account. As of October 19, mine is gone. However, I need an account for my avatar. I rerouted all the SL IMs for OO to my personal email account and they add up. I am beginning to find "work" in SL with speaking engagements and may still have something on the horizon that I cannot divulge at this time. So, do I Yahoo!?

What seems to be the problem? What can one little guy do about the great big corporation stepping on him? Open another account! oberon0octagon@gmail.com is now in business. Not as elegant as the previous one, but it will do. The biggest determiner here is the CalendarCogs I have in SL that require a Google Calendar. (I also had a problem with Facebook since it's set up using the old, defunct account.)

And within 24 hours, this is what happened:

Hello,

Our system has determined that the name you provided on your Google+ profile Oberon Octagon may not actually be a name.

It may be that the name you provided is that of a business you represent. Or it may be that this is actually your name and our system made a mistake.
We've got a few options for you:

• If this is the name of a business, brand, or other organization, please sign in to your Google account and change the profile's name to a representative of the organization. You can then, while logged into this profile, create a Google+ Page for the organization. Pages are designed specifically with the needs of organizations in mind, while profiles are designed for individuals.
• If this is your name, please sign in and follow the instructions to submit more information and help us fix our mistake.
• If you want to change the name provided, please sign in and follow the instructions to edit your profile. You can also optionally add Oberon Octagon as a nickname, previous name, or transliterated name in addition to your common name, if appropriate.

If none of the above options are appropriate and you use your Google+ identity on YouTube, you can unlink your Google+ profile from YouTube. This will ensure that regular YouTube access will continue but your Google+ profile will be suspended until you take one of the actions above. If you manage a brand channel, we will soon have a better option for creating a Google-wide identity.
If you don't take one of these steps in the next 4 days, your Google+ profile will be suspended. While suspended, you will not be able to make full use of Google services that require an active profile, such as Google+, Reader, Picasa, and YouTube (if you use your Google+ identity on YouTube). This will not prevent you from using other Google services, like Gmail.
We're sorry for the inconvenience,
The Google+ team.

If I have access to mail and Google Calendar, I really don't give a rat's ass about Google + and YouTube for my avatar.

My Spiritfest Presentation

Where to post and how to post?

I've already posted the TED video by Shawn Achor that I used as part of a presentation at mid-time adult ed at First Pres and this weekend in Second Life at the International Spiritfest Weekend on my personal blog. I wasn't paid for my time but it still seems like it was a professional thing: I made a presentation, it took some technical skills, and I took the opportunity to plug my services as an avatar with spiritual director credentials as well as virtual worlds consultant. So here I am writing about it in Die/|\Hard ... if nothing else it's been too long since I've posted something here. I may post the text of my presentation, however, at Great Hot Shave (GHS), my personal blog.

I'm standing near the screen to the right. I brought a chair so my neko-oriented "stand" animations wouldn't be distracting.

At the end of August, I saw a notice posted by the Viriditas Meditation in SL group about the upcoming event. I actually saw that Isabelle Oaklourne was online, so I sent an IM expressing interest in presenting if that was possible and she told me to send a proposal pronto since they were filling up! (See my September 12 GSH post.)  I think I may have gone ahead and provided my blog post on Shawn Achor (see link in first paragraph) and mentioned I would discuss spiritual disciplines in regard to what Achor had to say.

I did this trusting that I could find a way to make the video available. It's much simpler now that one can create media objects and not have to fiddle with group affiliations and parcel ownerships. (You can build an object in SL and assign it a url as its texture, which in effect, allows you to present a Web page that can be scrolled and clicked on onto the surface of the object.) Nonetheless, when the time came to do the presentation, the staff provided the "screen," being a privileged group member* allowed me to drop in the url for my blog, and people still needed either to click on the screen to view it or grab the url to view it offworld, so to speak. I have yet to find a way to open a TED Talk video away from the TED.com site save for embedded code. I felt that it would be less distracting to access the video embedded on my blog than the TED site, which has a lot of distracting views of other related videos to the right of their screen. BTW, while it should be possible given you have the ability to click on buttons, you cannot get the full screen mode button to work on a media object (or at least it hasn't worked for me so far).
_____________
*I was made an "S F Musician" in the Lunar Lounge group so I could rez items. While I didn't need to rez my video object, I did rez a "slide" from a screen capture of the five practices that Achor recommends to shift one's attitude toward happiness. I listed them in my chat text but the slide covered the screen with the end of the video, blocking any concerted effort one might have made to access and run the video again. Just seemed like a useful thing to do.

The program included musical and dance performances as well as presentations. This was a live performance on piano. The folks in bright teal-colored shirts standing back in middle of the shot were staff, reading to change the stage for my presentation. It was a really smooth transition.

Further preparations included a notecard with my resume on it, basically what you see in my Spiritual Direction CV page here on my D/|\H blog. On another notecard I put the text of my presentation. I wasn't sure whether I would need to give it out, but I figured I would cut and paste it paragraph by paragraph as I read it. This presents a challenge for not having practiced this beforehand! I was using Voice and not certain that it would be translated, but I knew that people can have text translated automatically. So I thought it would be important to send out the text via Chat. This went somewhat smoothly, though at one point I cut text from my notecard and wasn't able to see it right away onscreen in chat. I was able to paste it back into the notecard. Often, though, I would paste into chat and forget to hit return to send it out right away. I also posted the same paragraph I'd posted previously ... on two occasions.

It probably looked smoother to the audience than it felt like for me. That's my story and I'm running with it.

My first paragraph was a disclaimer. I knew that this was an ecumenical event, so I wanted to be sure to acknowledge that I was speaking from a Christian perspective but that the principles of spiritual formation were universally applicable. I posted the paragraph while waiting to be sure folks had finished viewing the video--there was no way to know if we were all in sync in that regard. About halfway through reading it, I got a message from someone saying to the effect, It's cool, you may skip ahead! and I did.

I really hadn't timed myself but just felt there would be time--I had 45 minutes--for discussion. There was time and there was discussion! I felt energized by the experience. I was told by Isa and the person in charge of the Nirvana sim where the fest was held that I would be welcome to present again!

An interesting experience. You do not make eye contact in this kind of presentation. The screen, for one, is cluttered with the notecard text on one side and the chat readout box on the other. To scroll around to see people or even to take pictures would have been taxing my limited ability to multitask. (What I did take, of course, happened while the video played. I also was able to check out a few profiles of people attending.)

I look forward to more opportunities!

My Next Phone

With one app after another telling me that they'd work with Win 7.5, which will not install in my Samsung, I guess I'm looking at a different company for the future. I will say that a new app, OverDrive has made me very happy, giving me the ability to download audiobooks from my library, like eMediaLibrary does on my wife's Nook. I am downloading Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles and have another title on Hold.

The Windows 8 interface looks great. Not so sure about the curved glass in terms of it scratching but there are screen protectors that work well enough.

Work Tools

I work in a cubicle on the 18th floor of a modern glass-and-steel building in downtown Chicago. I do not like fluorescent lighting and during most of my career was able to avoid it. The lighting here is indirect: rows of fluorescent lights but pointing toward the ceiling, aligned above the walls of the cubes so the light reflecting off the ceiling falls on the occupants. I'm happy.

I have some great tools to play with. I use all three of the major browsers--IE, Firefox, and Chrome--to handle my communications and work. I have Adobe Design Premium, which for me is a bit overkill on the Web editing, since I would prefer to work in code and not use so much overhead that Dreamweaver provides. Particularly when using an older Windows XP-based, Pentium DC desktop computer--it can take a long time to load. Codelobster would be just peachy. I have grown to appreciate the Search/Replace tool that allows handling very long strings and multiple documents, however.

For cropping and resizing pictures, my old standby LView Pro would be wonderful but Microsoft Office Picture Manager is fine, and if I have to save in a particular format, MS Paint is good in a pinch. So Photoshop only opens when I accidentally try to Preview a PNG or BMP file. BTW, at home, as mentioned in a previous article, I have a new laptop and because I couldn't find my registration number for LView Pro, I checked out a new down'n'dirty 64-bit paint program called Paint.Net. Since I know I've got at least two registration numbers on file with the LVP people, I was disappointed in not hearing from them when I asked them about telling me my numbers. Bad customer service doesn't get rewarded. And Paint.Net is very cool. Will write more later.

For the heavy lifting of content management, we use Adobe's CQ5. Next to Sitefinity, which I have mentioned elsewhere, this is a very good program for handling a huge Website. I like the separation of asset files--graphics, multimedia, documents--in their own database that can be shared by the organization. I have only two complaints that just make me shake my head in wonder at the arrogance of large companies like Adobe. CMS programs are not new anymore. I cannot imagine any excuse for allowing either of these limitations (see the screenshots below) to exist when charging a premium fee for the honor to be frustrated by them. Yes, there are work-arounds for them but I want to hear the reasons why these defective features are allowed. So far, I am deafened by the silence!

The file selector for the DAM (document asset module?) doesn't get any wider than this despite plenty of room for doing so. WTF? Can we spell laZy a$$ progrAmMing?

This is the editor for CQ5. As you can see, there's a lot of white space under it. Those seven lines of text is all you get to look at no matter how wide or deep you open that window! Any significant editing requires you to go into HTML mode and copy and paste to your editor of choice, and then paste it back. As a frustration bonus, any time you paste in text, the window pops you to the top line of text and you have to scroll to find where you were working. There's no excuse for this, srsly.

If it had been up to me, I would have gone with an open source CMS like Drupal, which is much more user friendly and feature rich.
We also use Listserv Maestro for handling high-volume html-based emails. Learning to use it has been easy, although it, too, has some questionable quirks. I can understand why they've done templates in such an elaborate fill-in-the-blank way but it doesn't meet my particular needs very well.

One great thing we have here is good support. It's an interesting approach but there's a digital marketing side as well as the IT side, for handling problems or needs like creating short URLs or consulting on best way to handle Web projects. Much more transparent than my last situation.

My New Home Rig

When I lost my job in 2009, I needed a computer to call my own for the times when Jessie was home (three days out of five during typical work week). She had pretty much taken over the downstairs desktop PC, so it was pretty serendipitous that Alex had gone out and purchased a new laptop leaving his old one available. Other than the fact that its internal disk drive was fried and it needed to have its OS restored, it was a potent 17-inch Toshiba on which he had played World of Warcraft and other video-intensive games. More than I needed for job searching, but it ran SL decently. (SL was a much-needed place to escape for me during that period.) You get used to a screen that's been marred by the sands of Bagdad. It was a heavy machine to carry around but the price, even with needed repairs and updates to OS, was still better than shelling out for a new one.
(I had to get an external drive and pay about $150 to get a PC shop to install Windows 7 on the laptop. It's interesting that the installation process asked me to delete the driver for the external drive, which made installation using same drive untenable. I needed a wizard that wasn't running from the disk.)

Two years later, with the advent of the mesh-enabled viewers and other advancements, I was having a tough time getting SL to run without crashing. A five-year old laptop, alas, is pretty much ancient these days.

I didn't need the laptop for job searching anymore. I had a job. But we've gotten used to having our own computers, so we agreed that I could shop for a new laptop with a limited budget. The old Toshiba would go back to Alex.

Another of the great benefits of working for the ABA is their advantage program with discounts from HP, Toshiba, and Lenovo, the latter of which I hadn't heard of save for the ThinkCentre on my desk at work. I was most interested in video handling and found a great deal on a 15.6-inch Lenovo Ideapad, which had 6GB of RAM and AMD Radeon 6840 video card. I just haven't read anything very positive about game-handling by MS-based video memory handlers, so while it was tempting to look at some high-end Intel chip-based lappies from the other two makers, I went with Lenovo. It's not the equivalent of Alex's nVidia-equipped Toshiba in its prime, but it runs Second Life like a dream.

Lenovo allows you to customize the laptop, which is cool and tempting, with a multitude of warranty plans. Its reasonably priced accidental coverage plan was definitely a factor in choosing it over the other manufacturers' offerings. I saved about $360 with the member discount!

I went with 15-inch screen because I knew I'd eventually be using this thing on business trips and wanted to cut down on weight. After a week of it breaking me in, I knew I was going to need to get a stand for the laptop as well as a separate keyboard (see pix). No stand was going to be quite enough to get the screen as eye-level as I wanted it so I grabbed some large books to achieve a better ergonomic solution. The price point on a standard, wired keyboard was such that I could afford the Logitech wireless keyboard. For some reason, the guy at Office Deport didn't think I would like the frue-frue designs adorning the keyboard (see above pic on left) but from the amount of those keyboards they had on hand, I could see why they were on sale. I have no problem with frue-frue, although I do wish I had the USB port back for adding a Bluetooth reader on it but I figure I can switch that out with my external hard drive. I love the keyboard on the laptop when I have it on my lap, but the wireless keyboard mean I'm not reaching over the mousepad, but resting my wrist on my wrist pad. On the above picture on the far right you can see a portion of my old, reliable Logitech Marble Mouse. The built-in laptop pointing device has yet to be built that I would endorse.

Speaking of USB ports, the Fellowes support stand is great in providing me with four more USB ports. Even though I use a 650GB external HD, I like to dedicate flashdrives to my SL and profession-related saves, so I definitely appreciate having the extra ports, with the laptop's four USBs taken up by HD (look for label B lower middle of the photo), mouse, and keyboard, the fourth (A) one is used to add four more (C--follow the blue lanyard to the row of flashdrives on the right). One of which occasionally is home to my smart phone's USB cable.

With a full-fledged version of Windows 7 to match the one downstairs, I can now network our PCs and use the printer downstairs as well as share pix and dox. Like my phone, I gave the computer a name rather than my name, which is being used on my partition of the downstairs PC anyway.  I confess the smaller screen has taken some getting used to but the benefits outweigh the drawbacks.

And that's why it's called a smart phone

The Calendar app that came with my Windows smart phone is pulling up event dates from my Facebook account. I know that I need to be more pro-active with my use of the calendar. This functionality is great. I may not have put some of these events on my calendar but since it took no effort on my part, I'm quite happy to pick and choose which of these events I'll ignore. It made me realize why it's called a smart phone.

Too bad the humans behind the phones aren't so smart. As mentioned in my previous post about the phone, it doesn't appear to actually run Windows 7.5 even thought both AT&T and Samsung have text stating that it comes loaded with 7.5. Here's my chat with Samsung:

Please wait for a Samsung Agent to respond.

You are now chatting with 'Simpson'. There will be a brief survey at the end of our chat to share feedback on my performance today.

Your Issue ID for this chat is LTK56401088025X

Simpson: Hi, thank you for contacting Samsung Technical Support. How may I help you today?

Visitor: I'm having trouble updating my phone to Windows 7.5. When I use Zune, and update it, it says I don't need an update. It say I have Windows 7.1.

Simpson: I understand that you facing problem in updating your phone. Is that correct?

Visitor: Yes.

Simpson: Thank you for confirming.

Simpson: May I know the model number of your phone ? You can find the model number beneath the phone's battery which generally starts with SGH, SCH or SPH .

Visitor: SGH-i1677

Simpson: Thank you.

Simpson: Would you mind in holding for a few minutes while I check the information for the updates?

Visitor: Go ahead. NP.

Simpson: Thank you.

Simpson: Thank you for holding. I appreciate your time and patience.

Simpson: To check the current version of this phone, follow the following steps:

Simpson:

Simpson: Press ##634# Call - This will open the Diagnostic Application.

Simpson: Press *#1234#

Simpson: Please note the PDA and Phone versions.

Visitor: In process

Simpson: Okay.

Visitor: i677uckj1 for pda and phone

Simpson: Thank you.

Simpson: After completion please uninstall the Diagnosis application.

Simpson: From the home screen touch Arrow key.

Simpson: Touch and Hold Diagnosis.

Simpson: Touch uninstall.

Visitor: couldn't get that to work ... will try again

Simpson: I will be right with you.

Simpson: Sure.

Simpson: I see that the versions you provided is the latest version released for this phone.

Simpson: There are no updates available right now for your phone.

Visitor: So it doesn't run 7.5?

Simpson: I am sorry as of now for your phone it doesn't have.  [Talking to Homer Simpson?]

Visitor: Why? It is described as having Windows 7.5 loaded.

Simpson: I am sorry. I have double checked and there are no updates for your phone.

Let's be clear that I really like this phone! The more I use it, the more I cannot believe I waited so long to work with one. OTOH, maybe an earlier version of WinPhone would not have been such a pleasure. I only took this investigation so far because if I like 7.1 so much and all the buzz is that 7.5 is a step up.

I have a feeling some of the apps I am trying to use require 7.5 and that is disappointing.

More Observations on My Samsung Smartie

What am I learning as I become acquainted with my Samsung Focus Flash (SFF)? I mentioned in my personal blog that people hunched over their phones as they walk to and from the train remind me to keep my head up. I understand now the obsession with the object in their hands! I found myself crossing Wacker Drive checking on the progress of a download and realized this was totally unsafe behavior. I can wait.

Really.

I am happy I bought the hard case and screen protector for my phone. The matte look on screen and case is pleasing. Sooner or later I'm going to drop the damn thing, so maybe it will survive! I can remember dropping my Flight into my bike's handlebar bag and the screen rubbed against the mini tire pump. Those scratches on the screen were there for the two-plus years I had the thing.

So, obviously with great power comes more elaborate maintenance duties. The merging of my Facebook and Gmail with my old phone's data has made my "contact list" complicated, although the ability to get a screen of alphabetized tiles to maneuver all my contacts is nice. I can also create groups to make the navigation personalized. All good. The built-in calendar is terrific, a major improvement over the pathetic thing I found on my Samsung Flight. I am not well-organized to begin with, so the better the app, the more likely I am to use it and get myself organized. There may be even better apps out there, but for now, I am quite content.

The tiles concept of the Window phone UI is pretty good. I can scan it with a thumb flick up and down or swipe to the left and bring up a column of smaller icons with a long (and growing) list of apps. I would like to say I used the phone to Google what the best free apps for the Windows Phone are, but I did not. The list makes sense though: Adobe Reader, ESPN Score Center, Facebook, Flixster, IMDb, Shazam, SkyMap Free, Spotify, and YouTube. I really don't want to get loaded up with games but I like Mah Jong and am testing several freebies. I am also testing several radio apps: Last.fm and Slacker Radio as well as the built-in AT&T Radio, accessing Pandora via the IE app.

Shazam is the app that lets you tag music off of the radio or other sources. SkyMap lets you aim your phone at the sky and get a starmap of what is out there. ESPN can be programed to provide scores and news about my particular sports interests. Between Flixter and IMDb, I should be able to sate my movie interests--the former also knows my favorite theaters so I can quickly check showtimes. While Facebook messages run nicely from a tile on the opening page of the phone, the app puts it into the familiar blue-and-white trim format with photos. The YouTube app enhances immediate access to my favorites and other features if I used them.

Spotify would be perfect but it's $10/mo. and will very likely push my data loading perilously if I am not careful.

Photostudio works in conjunction with the camera for setting up modes of shooting: portrait,  panorama, etc. Then it has an editing mode and a sending mode, letting you preset Facebook and photosharing sites. I believe it came with the phone and looks intriguing. Obviously, the camera is great and has been very easy to send photos to FB and contacts.

I like the idea of starting my day with a spiritual focus. I already subscribe to Richard Rohr's Meditations, so I can check my email and open it to a Web page to read it. It's great being able to pinch the screen to enlarge it to fit. I also downloaded a Mars Hill Church app and can view video sermons and other devotional type material. A Daily Devotions app provides a menu for Christian, This is Today, Our Daily Bread, Worthy Devotion, and Photos. To complete, for now, the spiritual tools, I have a free NIV Bible app. (It is just the New Testament, so does that mean I have to pay for the Old Testament?)

I had bought a few ringtones for the previous phone with the understanding that I'd be able to transfer them to a new phone. I was mislead as far as I can tell since I have not been able to unlock them, nor find any history of purchase on the AT&T account by which to get them redelivered. Therefore, I will buy no more tones from AT&T. I was only able to recover "Layla," which I assign to my older son's number. I really loved hearing U2's "It's a Beautiful Day" when my old phone rang. I don't like being interrupted by the phone but that tone reminded me, yes, it's a beautiful day, behave yourself! I'll get over not having it.

Myxer has done alright in terms of getting free ringtones. Since I named my phone Sgt. Pepper, I have as my general ringtone, the song of the same name. It may or may not be The Beatles, but it's a very good imitation, if not. I have still to find the best ones for family friends but I am in no rush now that I have covered my essentials. I had downloaded an app that claimed to provide Myxer tones as well as others but the interface was not worth the time to learn compared to the ease of Myxer. SkyMusic also has downloads for ringtones, but the "Beautiful Day" clip leads up to the chorus when it really ought to start with it.

I have plugged into my laptop and synced accounts with Zune and Windows Live. The AT&T site says the SFF comes with 7.5 but according to Zune I have 7.1 and cannot update it further. That's too bad but also, being my first smartphone, not worth $300 or whatever the Nokia 900 costs. (Interestingly, I just took a survey from AT&T about my purchase and it segued from my satisfaction with sales and service into questions about the Nokia, asking if I could do it over would I pay $99 for it in trade.) I would be curious to see how the metro IE interface works, but the price point was too high.

While I was at a guitar workshop, I downloaded a nifty metronome app (Klick!) and a guitar tuner app (Accurate Tuner Free). I have a tuner/metronome device in my guitar case but the apps were free and I can imagine scenarios where the phone might be all I have at hand.

It does sound like the least little rationale sends me off to the App store, so I guess the world of smartphones has sucked me in most thoroughly. So far, however, the free stuff looks sufficient to my perceived needs.

A Look at the Nook

Last year, my wife Jessie graduated with her masters degree, as well as celebrated her birthday and Mother's Day in the same week. (Obviously, the latter two always coincide on a regular basis.) The boys and I thought this was a very significant occasion. On a cue she'd given me a couple of months earlier, I suggested we pool together and get her an eReader. At the time, the Kindle's tablet and the Nook Color were fairly close in price. Barnes & Noble (B&N) was just on the verge of updating the OS to making the Nook Color a true tablet, so I again ignored the mass popularity aspect of a product (see previous post on smartphones) and bought her the Nook.

For the next few months, we shared oohs and aahhs over the capabilities. Not the least of its features was a free class on how to use it, held in the evening at one of the nearby stores. It works with our U-verse wifi at home, so we can check email with it out on the screen porch. We can download eLibrary books! The availability of such books we like is fairly limited but it was still pretty cool. Jessie's Scottish heritage will not indulge in spending needlessly even if she has a Barnes&Noble money card with which to charge, but I've seen great applications that would make it a very useful tool as well as toy. Here's the latest listing from the B&N Website:

•     Movies & TV Shows from Netflix
•     NOOK Comics™ including the largest collection of Marvel graphic novels
•     World's most advanced VividView™ 7" touchscreen
•     Over 2.5 million books, magazines, interactive kids' books
•     Must-have apps like Angry Birds, top music services, & more
•     Tablet essentials–email & Web w/video
•     Expandable memory- add up to 32 GB w/ microSD™ card
•     Always free NOOK support in-store

I will say this: the Nook's Android OS is not very intuitive and had some influence on my decision to test out the Windows Phone. Hmm, what would happen if the Nook came with Windows? Nah! Never happen!

We've both been surprised to see the Nook on TV ads lately, but are pleased that it's being shown off for the good value it is.

And now there's news that Microsoft is investing in the Nook. The financial experts aren't sure it's going to be enough for the Nook to survive in a market that iPads and Kindles are crushing. But here's an interesting wrinkle that MS needs to follow up on: those 641 B&N college bookstores could be reinvented as "education solution centers." The liabilities the financial critics are pointing at in this transaction could be turned into assets. As the article suggests, Microsoft also needs to shop for coursepack companies and companies that know how to package content for the Nook.

It's all a very interesting development. It's a great tablet and I wouldn't count it out just yet.The price point between a Nook and an iPad for a college student is considerable. Put Windows 8 on a Nook and keep that price point ... Ooh, doggies!

My New Smartphone

Jessie's cellphone was beginning to conk out and when she went to the local AT&T store, they said we were beyond our contract period, so we could get new phones. (I understand there's a context here of two completely different perceptions, sales talk and what the average person understands.) Independent of what was going on with her phone, I had been thinking that as a person with "technology" in his job title, it was probably time to jump into the realm of smartphones and acquire some experience. So the timing seemed serendipitous.

Twenty-odd years ago, I was outspoken in my distaste for Microsoft Corporation (MS). I recall writing in ST Informer something about the sheep-like behavior of the crowd adapting Windows. (I would still argue that Atari had a superior computer at that time.) So what in the world am I doing with a Windows phone? Um ...

I have always followed a different drummer in regard to computing ... Atari ST computer, GEM, WordPerfect, Corel Draw, HotDog HTML Editor. I actually did an afternoon's worth of research on the pros and cons of iPhone, Android, and WinPhone. What I found is that MS revamped their phone OS and was getting very good reviews. I was most concerned about that than the accolades the other two phones get for the ginormous collections of apps, which I assume aren't so big when you count the redundancy of apps doing mainly the same thing, and their superior marketshare. Those attributes have never really moved me.

So I went with the underdog! And in this case, Microsoft is the underdog. I also liked the idea that whether I will actually use them, my phone came with Office apps. I would not have to learn new word processing routines even though I really dislike Word. I am good with holding conflicting beliefs simultaneously.

We both bought Samsung phones because a few months ago we bought new chargers. We both liked our Flights and she didn't want to relearn how to use her phone, so she got a Flight  2. I got a Focus Flash and have to relearn using it but at least I don't have to buy another charger. Go figure that my phone cost $0.99 and hers cost $50 (but $0.00 after rebate card is received). Of course, I got a charger with the phone but that's okay ... I need one at work since it really does go through its battery quickly and the charger is also one of those that uncouples from the plug part and can be used as a data cable with my laptop at home or computer at work.

Needless to say, I am having a great time with my new toy and will have more to report as I gain mastery over it's many features.