Recently the iPad has been a source of inspiration for my photoshop creativity. Since it functions so well as a photoframe, it seemed only natural to use it as a frame for frame breaking. I also must admit to being astonished that I seem to be the first person to see its pristine reflective glass as a place to put an ice skater. It seems so natural to me. Here are my first two attempts at iPad photoshoppery.
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I was one of the first owners of an iPhone in Spain, buying my iPhone 3G on July 14, 2008. Just a couple weeks ago, almost two months after the launch in the United States, the iPhone 4 began to be announced in the local mobile shops. In 2008, I paid 359€ for my phone, a decision I do not at all regret. So I was pretty much prepared for a similar amount of cash to be exchanged for my upgrade two years later. Here’s what happened when I bought my iPhone 4 yesterday:
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In general, for just about any academic topic you want to know more about, you can find information on the internet to satisfy your curiosity. Luddites complain that “We know less these days because we can forget things and look them back up with such ease!”, but I think that’s a load of bollocks. Having more knowledge at our fingertips means we can learn more, and, even more important, we can recheck our current knowledge more often to keep it accurate.
Several times a day I find myself in a situation in which my understanding of a subject is unclear, so I look it up on the internet to clarify my knowledge. Over the past week, however, I have had the same rare experience twice: that the all-knowing internet was unable to clarify my foggy understanding.
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An oversimplified description of my job as a computer programmer goes something like this.
It’s pretty rare for the original writing of a program to have a significant bug in it after testing, although I’m not perfect. Almost all bugs are introduced in step #5. When you first write the program, the entire program and its relationship with other programs is in your mind. But when you go back to look at old code, it’s just not fresh in your memory, and it’s very easy to make a change without taking into consideration all the consequences that change will have.
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I’m an avid reader of Richard Wiseman’s blog, and I find his Friday Puzzles to be particularly fun. Today’s puzzle is as follows:
How can you place the arithmetical signs ‘+’ and ‘-’ between the consecutive numbers 123456789 so that the end result is 100? So, for example, you could go…..
12+34+56-7-89 , but that would make 6, so that doesn’t work.
Try to come up with the method that uses the least number of symbols.
We continue to encourage Nora to play with her iPad. She definitely like the sounds it makes; her favorite is the oinking pig, which she likes to dance to. While she clearly understands that she needs to touch the screen, but she tends to be too quick in her pokes, and her actions either result in dragging the icons around or the icon she’s going for is simply not triggered because her touch is so fast. At the moment, the iPad remains a “noise box” to her, but I have little doubt she will learn to control it within the next year. And then it’s just a matter of time before the Pentagon gets hacked.
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Today I went to my bank to pay my Spanish taxes, which, after avoiding double taxation, came to a whopping 4.87€. I had done the taxes on my computer with the downloadable java app and had generated a PDF for myself and one for my wife. However, when I printed them, they came out strangely formatted. I couldn’t understand why, so I loaded the PDFs onto a USB pen drive and took them to the bank along with the poorly printed versions. They said that my printed versions weren’t good enough and agreed to print the ones I had on my pen drive. So I watched as my local banker inserted the pen drive I gave him into his Windows machine and opened and printed the PDFs.
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Recently I’ve been enjoying the genre of popular psychology books. I realized that what I most enjoyed about my college psychology courses were reading about the experiments and studies, especially the ones with seemingly counter-intuitive irrational results. So far in this genre I’ve consumed Predictably Irrational, How We Decide, Outliers and Stumbling on Happiness, which no one took my hint to buy me. One of them, funnily, doesn’t fit that neatly into the genre.
I bought my first Kindle book. I bought it on my computer, and when I started up the Kindle app on the iPad, it magically appeared. While the UI of the Kindle app is not as nice as iBooks, it’s not at all bad. I hear the Barnes & Noble one is horrible. From what I can tell, because the Kindle books are created principally for use with their monochrome device, none of the images aside from the book covers have any color. For most books, this isn’t really a drawback, but it could be for some. There are two major pros to the Kindle app that has me convinced that I will not exclusively be reading iBooks:
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I came up with this silly little wordplay joke the other day. It’s kind of like those goofy jokes from children’s joke books about a dog saying that sandpaper is “Ruff!” Okay, have I lowered your expectations enough? Here we go:
A: Panorama.
