In Which I Purchase Modern Technology And Am Duly Impressed

You may have noticed that I just got an iPhone. No? Well, now you have, because I'm blogging about it. After having tweeted, texted, emailed, voice-messaged, and talked about it.

I bought the 3G S to replace my old cellie, which was so old that the camera used iodine-sensitive silvered plates and mercury vapor. And man, is my sexy new iPhone awesome. But the feature that has absolutely sold me on it was the one I least expected: using the thing as an e-book reader.

It never occurred to me that I might like e-books. I mean, I have shelves and shelves of real books. I have stacks of books by the bed, by the couch, in boxes in the garage. I like the physicality of books, the smell and the feel of them. I don't like reading on my computer: I'm constantly fiddling with the text size or shifting about to rest a tense neck. So I had no interest in an e-book reader.

Until I accidentally got one.

The first thing I did when I got my new phone all charged and activated and set up was what every new iPhone buyer does: head to the App Store. Scanning the the free stuff, I see the Kindle for iPhone app. What the hey, right? A few moments later I'm browsing the Kindle store, looking at the freebies. Fusty public domain stuff mostly. A fantasy novel about dragons fighting in the Napoleonic Wars. Pass. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. Meh, though I feel vaguely guilty for not being more interested in reading it. Then: Conrad. Wodehouse. Chesterton. Well, well. I never did get around to reading Nostromo, it'd be nice to have some Jeeves stories for amusement while stranded in waiting rooms and such, and I lost my copy of The Man Who Was Thursday....

Zoop.

(That's the sound data makes as it flies around, in case you were wondering.)

Neat. That was quick.

I continue futzing around in the App Store: Sudoku! New York Times crossword puzzles! After evaluating the use of the device as a mobile gaming platform (ie, crashing on the couch and doing sudoku and crossword puzzles all afternoon) I remember the Kindle thingie.

About forty-five minutes later I look up from "Jeeves and the Hard-Boiled Egg". It had taken me less than a minute to configure the thing: white text on a black background; large, easily readable type; landscape mode. It weighs less than a paperback: this is what got me. One-handed reading! Go ahead, snicker, and no, I haven't yet downloaded The Story of O. But It's really COMFORTABLE. I never expected that. Reading in bed without a book-light is a life-changing experience.

But more importantly it addresses an issue I have always struggled with: I scan. I read fast and spottily, and though I grasp essentials I am rarely fully engaged with the text in the way a responsible reader should be. The brevity of each screen of text on the iPhone encourages me to read more closely.

Now, we'll see how well that theory works when I read something a tad more challenging than the tales of the cheerfully hapless Bertie Wooster. I just got Bertrand Russell's The Problems of Philosophy, so that'll be the test case. I hear the Kindle isn't necessarily the best e-book reader for the iPhone. So we'll see where this goes. I'm hesitant to actually PAY for e-books, though. I'd like to see publishers develop a model where the e-book version comes automatically with the paper version. That's a publishing model I could get behind: that way I've got the "back-up" for the shelf and the convenience of the e-text. But it seems like there's a wealth of free stuff out there to read in the Kindle format. And that scratches that Pokemon-like itch, too: it's a thrill to zoop a buncha free classics, knowing that they're there in your pocket all the time. Gotta zoop 'em all...

And I find it pleasing to put the highest-tech device I've ever owned to such a low-tech use.

Here's a brief summary of what I DON'T like about the iPhone: surfing the Internet, that fiddly virtual keyboard, the fact that with 3G enabled you can actually SEE the battery charge indicator dropping in real time. Pretty much the same complaints everyone else has.

On the whole, though, it's a happy-making wonder of a device.

UPDATE: OK, I totally snagged the book about the dragons who fight Napoleon.

Hey, Check This Out

All three of my loyal readers (OK, the two loyal ones and YOU, the shifty character in the corner) are hereby encouraged to check out a few new (to me) sites that will help you get your rage on:

Electicker is a site with an astounding amount of aggregated information crammed onto it about the upcoming US Presidential elections and PoliticalFilter is a MetaFilter knock-off (with better design -- sorry, Matt) for posting political links that the membership can then yell about.

Both of them were highlighted on today's Big Big Question, yet another site with MetaFilter connections -- it's run by MeFi moderator cortex.

*extends grasping hand* OK, guys, I pimped your sites -- pay me now!

I Hate The Comments On Al.com

In the Birmingham News today, the lead story concerned a terrible mass killing that happened in north Shelby County. Five men were found with their throats slashed. There were few details reported in the dead-tree edition, so I went to al.com to find out more.

Sure enough, like any good news website, they had more information. The men were all Hispanic, and they had no identification on their corpses. The bodies were taken to the state crime lab in Montgomery. FBI, US Marshalls, ABI were all getting involved to help solve the crime. So far, so good. Then I made the mistake of reading the comments following the updated story.

I've got to leave this state.

Reading those comments is like being smacked in the face with a wet Klan robe. The level of racism, bigotry, and sheer stupid hatred expressed therein was dismaying, to say the least. I won't repeat what was said. You can read them for yourself if you choose.

But if that's the level of intellect (among the people who actually bother to read the paper, don't forget), then this state is doomed and we deserve whatever we get.

I'm dismayed, disgusted, and saddened.

I guess I should have expected it. But DAMN, y'all. We can do better.

Oh PayPal, How I Hate You So

So I want to send some money to a friend in Canada. It's a significant amount of money, but no more than many middle-class folks earn in a week. I figure, hey, I have that PayPal account I never use, I'll just do that and zap it'll be there instantly, right?

Oh, no. Not even close.

I start this process last Saturday, where I sign in to my PayPal account and send the money. No problem. About an hour later, I get an email from the recipient, who informs me that, uh, thanks for the cash, but I don't think you meant to send me this. I check email addresses. Damn. She's right. Her email address is one letter off from the correct one -- I have made a mistake, and I'm lucky that the person who got the payment was honest enough to notify me. I email her back, apologize for the hassle, and ask her to deny the transaction. Done. OK, now that that is straightened out, I figure I can resend the amount to the correct address.

Oh, no. This is just getting started.

I try to resend, this time to the (triple-checked) correct email address. Transaction = FAIL. I call PayPal (who do not offer their customers an 800 number -- yeah, it's a 15-minute hold on a long-distance call). The guy I talk to tells me that because the first transaction was denied, the second transaction won't be possible until the pending charge on my credit card is reversed, which makes a weird sort of sense, so I figure I'll wait until EOB and resend in the morning.

The next day, the transaction fails again. I need another form of payment, PayPal informs me. Though I have no way to do so, short of driving to their headquarters and standing in the parking lot with a bullhorn, I wish to inform PayPal that they will never ever ever have my bank account information, no matter how they beg and plead or cajole and demand.

So today I spend a good HOUR (at daytime long-distance rates!!!) on the phone with some lady who claims her name is Joan but, judging by her accent, is more likely named Jalbala (pretty name, means "lotus flower", I think). She is kind, compassionate, well-informed, and completely and utterly unhelpful. I speak to her supervisor, Anna. For the record, Anna is not a bot. But she may as well have been, because she is snide, cold, unhelpful, and completely unsympathetic.

Here's what I learned from Anna-Not-A-Bot:

1. My credit card is now flagged to hell and back by PayPal's ominous-sounding "Internal Security Department" and can NEVER EVER BE USED FOR A PAYPAL TRANSACTION EVER EVER AGAIN STOP ASKING.
2. I mistyped an email address and had a transaction denied. Therefore it is all my fault, nothing they can do, tough shit, so long sucker.
3. There are no humans who work in PayPal Internal Security, only Cylons who do not deign to communicate with meatbags.
4. The only way to resolve this problem is to give PayPal my bank account info.

Um, no. I use a credit card online, because I'd rather risk THEIR money than MY money, and because my card issuer has a phalanx of lawyers just quivering for the chance to sue some hacker into dust.

So I went to Western Union. With a wad of cash. Which they cheerfully accepted. And sent to my friend. Took five minutes. No problem. Even got a smile from the little cutie working the desk.

I'm going to post this, then go to Amazon.com and attempt to purchase a book using my PayPal account. If that transaction is denied, I'm closing the account with a hearty, "Fuck you, PayPal!"

Planning A Long Trip?

Google can help!

Watch Idiocy Unfolding In Real Time!

Skipping the 20th century entirely, the Birmingham City Council will begin live online streaming video of their meetings next Tuesday.

Watch the sausage getting made here.

Oh, Snap

Hint to hedge-fund 20-somethings with scammy Internet charity sites: don't astroturf AskMetaFilter and expect to get away with it.

Heh. That's why I love that place. That, and the pancakes.

And you gotta figure that if the founders of that site are as unprincipled in person as they demonstrably are online, their "administrative costs" are probably sky-fucking-high.

Happy New Year, everybody!

Alabama Court Watch: Huh, What?

My main crush on teh intarwebs, Loretta Nall, has invited me to participate in the Alabama Court Watch blog, and I have accepted her gracious invitation. I have naught of value to offer besides drunkenly bilious semi-coherent bathos, so I will refrain from posting there for the time being, but know that I am hovering, always frowning in disapproval at bad grammar and sloppy spelling. So, Loretta: it should be "I and another Court Watcher attended...", not, "myself and another Court Watcher attended", for fuck's sake.

And when I was in court-mandated brainwashing and was subjected to several watch-me-pee sessions in Shelby County, I was always, without fail, offered a receipt. Never even had to ask for one, at either the court referral officer's office in Columbiana or the dank windowless warren of torture rooms that is the Shelby County Mental Health Whatchamacallit down 31 near the Alabaster city hall. And I don't remember anyone there not getting a receipt or complaining about having to ask for one. In fact, I specifically recall one time the network was down in Columbiana and dude had the old-fashioned spiral-bound carbon-copy receipt book out and had been scribbling in it all day by the looks of it. So, while human error or authoritarian malfeasance is never out of the question, I tend to think tweaker dude was lying his ass off about not getting a pee ticket.

And getting called onto the carpet and publicly humiliated by your public defender is probably good formative character development for a mopy emo kid, whatever the reason.



So I look forward to participating in this project (largely by throwing bricks from the sidelines). I gotta ask about this, though:

Because, we are convinced that the majority of the defendants that make up the bulk of drug court case loads are adult marijuana smokers who are not breaking any laws other than possessing small amounts of marijuana for personal use.

Really? Surely there's hard data on that. Don't we pay people to keep track of this stuff? I imagine what we'll find is that marijuana is the most common illegal substance found but rarely the actual arresting offense. That's a guess, pulled directly out of my ass, but I suspect I'm right. Guy gets a DUI, cops find a roach in the ashtray. Guy gets popped selling pills, he's got a bong in his apartment. Gal picked up for public intox has a gram of kind bud in a cigarette pack. Pot's like the bonus bust for cops. No extra work, plenty of extra profit.

It'll be interesting to see how this plays out.

RSSkolnikov

Always wanted to read Crime and Punishment but can't find the time? Break Dostoevsky's 1866 meditation on murder and madness (which was, after all, originally published in serial form) into a more manageable 241 parts and read one a day in your RSS feed at DailyLit.

This is totally gimmicky, but it may be the only way I'll ever be able to make myself read Middlemarch.

On the other hand, it'll be nice to have these guys waiting for me in my browser...

Armchair Astronomy

When you've finished correcting Wikipedia and you've done your time in the virtual sweatshop of Amazon's Mechanical Turk, take a few minutes out of your day to do some deep-space astronomy by helping the good folks at Galaxy Zoo classify some galaxies.

There's millions of pictures of them, and humans are better than computers at classifying them. So if we all pitch in and do a few, we can get them all sorted. The site walks you through a five-minute tutorial showing you how to sort out the images, then you just click through them. Pretty easy, kinda dull, but then you realize that the chances are good that the picutre you're looking at is of an object in the universe probably never before seen by human eyes.

That's cool.

My Wireless "Broadband" Sucks

This is like dial-up, only three times more expensive. Any time I send data from a form like blogger or Metafilter, the connection resets.

Why can't I have nice things?