Wireless camera

Apple’s iPad, announced last week, appears to be the perfect device for consuming different kinds of media: video, the internet, text, games.

Which is why I won’t likely be getting one.1

Mike Melanson, at Read Write Web, noted, for instance, the lack of a camera in iPad and suggested it was a huge problem. I, myself, in private conversation, have said that the lack of a camera is one of the reasons I’m not that interested.

But where would a camera go? Facing towards the user, it would make a great camera for video chat, but that’s less than ideal if you’re going to be taking picture (or video) of someone else.

That being said, as I laid down last night, I was startled by a random thought: what if one could use their iPhone, tethered to the iPad via WiFi or Bluetooth, as a wireless camera?

Wouldn’t that be awesome? Stream the video to the iPad, which then saves the video or streams it off somewhere else? You can point it towards yourself, or the scene around you, where you like.

I thought that, since Apple is now allowing Bluetooth keyboards on iPad, that they would loosen up the restrictions on Bluetooth on the iPhone, too; for the moment, only Bluetooth headsets are allowed on non-jailbroken iPhones.

However, Mike Bissell looked into it and, apparently, all one can do is access files via Bluetooth, or so he said to me on Twitter.

That said, the tools to do almost this may already be available: right now, using the Ustream Broadcaster app, one can stream video from iPhone to a website, which one could watch on their iPad. Not quite the same thing, but close.

And I’m sure there will be more solutions available as the iPad starts to appear in the world.


1 Note that I’m not saying iPad isn’t going to be a hit, or that it’s broken somehow or stupidly designed. It’s simply not for me. I’m not that interested, as long as I have my iPhone for mobile consumption and my MacBook Pro for mobile creation.

Measure 66 and 67

I am glad that Measure 66, the initiative to raise the top rate for individuals making over $125,000 and families making over $250,000, and Measure 67, the initiative to increase the minimum corporate tax from $10 to $150, appears to have passed. At least, when I went to bed last night, the local newspaper, The Oregonian, was predicting they would both pass.

Which has to gall the editors at the Oregonian, considering the apparent lies they were telling in regards to the ballot measures in the last few weeks.

Be that as it may, I am hopeful that the measures passed due to some good ol’ fashioned populism. In my view, the rich have been getting theirs for quite some time, and meanwhile our basic, shared, infrastructure has been falling apart. Gee, cutting taxes doesn’t create jobs and help everyone out; who knew? Our streets are broken, our schools aren’t teaching, our sick aren’t getting healthy.

Passing these two ballot measures will help fill the giant budget gap that has been the result of the conservative movements anti-tax experiment. Conservative darling Grover Norquist’s desire to “drown government in the bathtub” is repudiated. Or so I hope.

Someone has to make the argument that government, as an institution, can make our lives better, not worse. Someone has to say, repeatedly and forcefully and sincerely, that government is the only institution we have that can face down amoral corporatism and redress the balance of power.

Of course, government that isn’t made up of the efforts of citizens is nothing more than another wing of corporate power. Which is pretty much what we have right now on a Federal level.

But the progressive movement is growing and that includes more involvement in government by regular folks.

Score one for us progressives today with the passage of Measure 66 & 67.

Gaming in a new way

I can’t play D&D the way I used to.

I mean, I could. But I have so many more tools and options available to me now.

25 years ago, I didn’t have a computer that can access vast stores of knowledge and stories, for example. Just being able to call up a Wikipedia article on the geography of North America has had a profound influence on my campaign, especially because I’m basing my map on real-world geography. In order to get this info back in the early days, I would have had to spend the afternoon at the library (not that that would have been a bad thing).

And that’s just general knowledge; it doesn’t even take into account the amount of game-specific sites out there! If I need random Elven names, or a list of possible encounters for a coastal wilderness, those are just a Google away.

Or take maps, for another example. In the old days, I would have had to draw the maps out by hand, on graph or hexagon paper. Making a larger campaign map, while fun and creative, meant a lot of effort and expense.

But I realized recently that I can use a good free image editor to do all the hard work, and only print it out once I have all the details filled in. And if I need a poster-sized print, FedEx-Kinkos is in my neighborhood. I can keep the version I see, with all the details not meant for players’ eyes in a layer I can turn off before printing.

Back when I was a kid, I had to make or purchase a DM’s screen with handy tables on it, to aid me in running the game and hide my notes from inquisitive eyes. These days, my laptop screen does both jobs much better. Every table I need to use is just a click away!

Need to generate player characters, and calculate the weight of all those weapons, armor, and gold they carry? There’s an app for that.

Here’s an idea I’ve had but haven’t actually used yet: if I need to share a picture with the players during a game, instead of printing it out, I can email or text it to one of the players who has an iPhone, which they can pass around the table to share! Easy peasy!

Rain

I ran in the rain yesterday.

It was pouring down, hard, for almost the entirety of my 5.22 miles and nearly an hour-long exercise. The “almost” is in there because I didn’t leave the house until it had slacked off a bit, the rain becoming a drizzle, lulling me into thinking that hey, maybe it won’t rain the entire time.

Of course, less than a minute or two from home, the rain picked up again, and pretty much did not stop for the rest of the day.

I had my iPhone with me, sealed up tight in not just one, but two ziploc bags, arranged so their openings were at different ends of the phone. Still, I worried that somehow, water would work its way in and render my expensive smartphone useless.

It didn’t.

I’ve run in the rain before. I’ve even enjoyed it before. But late last year, I allowed any excuse to prevent me from running. It’s too cold. It’s raining. It’s too warm. I’m too tired.

But in the last month or two, I’ve begun, again, to run. Even in the rain.

In fact, I ran stronger for the entire five-plus miles than I have in a while. Sure, I’ve had faster, shorter sessions, but that one on Sunday was steady nearly the entire way. The speed workouts I do once or twice a week really do help. So does losing weight. I’ll be in great shape for the Shamrock Run in March.

Is the rain motivating, in the sense of “I can’t wait to get out of this”? Maybe so. After I had finished my run, I still had to go do some shopping and maybe get a bite to eat, and I was less than motivated to go back out in it. I took a bus to one of my favorite restaurants, the Iron Horse, and ate, then took another bus trip, involving a transfer, to Fred Meyers in Oak Grove, then took another bus trip back to my neighborhood. I’d dressed for the weather, in camp pants, hat, and Columbia rain coat with hood, but even so, when I got back home, I was soaked through. Not a good feeling.

I still needed dinner, and did not have much food in the house, but I made do, because I was not going to go back out in the rain again that night.

And I didn’t. I’d had my fill.

Stupid rain.

iPhone apps

It’s Sunday and time for something a little less serious.

iPhone apps.

Friday I had a one-on-one with my boss, who is a gadget-hound and geek of the highest order. I mean that as a compliment; that’s how it should be in IT. And things have been going very smoothly at work, so I didn’t have much to talk about or requests to make, and when that wound down, my boss pulled out his iPhone 3GS and asked me if I had any cool new apps to recommend to him.

He knows I’m an Apple fan, and that I tend to keep up more on the Apple side of the tech divide than the Microsoft side. It’s fun and awesome, because at work we are massively majority Microsoft on the desktop, but if any questions or issues come up with Mac OS or iPhone, my boss will steer those my way.

Then last night, over at a friend’s house, his wife was asking me what cool iPhone apps I have, too. Apparently the hunger for “the next cool app” is high among iPhone users.

In any case, I looked over the apps I use the most, and realized that most of them are utilities, designed to do a specific task and do it well: I use Quicken to track my money, I use Livestrong to track my diet, Runkeeper to track my running.

The few “cool” apps I have, I actually rarely use. Shazam feels like magic: listen to this song and tell me the title, artist, and lyrics. It’s fun, but I don’t use it all that often.

Dragon Dictation feels like magic, too: transcribe what I’m saying. And it doesn’t fail very often, but when it fails, it’s very humorous. You may think I don’t use it often, and you’d be mostly right. I did, however, use it more in the winter when I was outside, wearing gloves, and needed to send an email or text, which is surprisingly often considering I’m a high text-sender.

(There are gloves out there that let one use a touch screen while wearing them, though, and I’d love to get a pair. Hint, hint.)

My “marquee” cool apps, though, I can really only show off at home: I have a handful of apps that let me control my entertainment system: play music, play a video, let guests pick a song from their iPhone. My major wish is that I could afford a way to let me power on the whole thing with my iPhone, and get rid of the remaining remote control, too. I’m sure there’s an app for that, too – I just can’t afford an upgrade right now.

Personal touch

A downside to cooking for myself more is that I don’t have as many conversations with waitstaff anymore.

That statement makes me seem a bit starved for human interaction, doesn’t it?

And I guess I am, a bit. Just a bit, though. I’m pretty happy right now with my social life. I spend a day or two a week with one or several of my friends. Tomorrow night I’ll be meeting a friends’ wife for the first time, having dinner at their house. Of course, earlier this week I hosted my monthly D&D game; prior to the game I spent the afternoon and had lunch with Terry. I’m in constant contact with Tracy via text, and regularly trade emails with Kevin.

Yeah, I’m happy with my social life right now. I have good friends around me.

The small part I miss, though, is the small random interactions, the chance encounters. If I’m honest, though, those were always few and far between in my life. Maybe they stand out in my memory only because I didn’t have regular contact with close friends? And because of the rarity of the chance encounter, I have to admit I wasn’t very good at them: I often ran out of things to say, or didn’t know how to continue the conversation, or failed to express an interest in talking to them again. Or, worse, did those things in an awkward way.

If I think about it now, though, I spend a bit more time at the grocery store these days. There’s a chance for interaction. I still visit my local coffee shop regularly and talk to my coffee guy and the girl who works there, and could possibly get to know some of the other regulars there. I see pretty much the same faces every day on my bus ride to and from work. The people who run the Thai restaurant near my house still recognize me, even though I don’t go in as often.

I still have opportunities for random conversations. Maybe the lack was just a mental blind spot for me? I’ve been feeling the winter doldrums quite a bit for the last month or two; hopefully with the return of sunnier weather and longer days, my mood will pick up.

Thoughts on a current lack of a health care reform bill for the President to sign

If I can get political for a brief moment1, I look around on the morning after the Massachusetts special election and see a lot of blaming going on. This is to be expected: elections produce winners and losers, and it’s human to try to figure out why.

I’ve got some opinions, too, but for the moment I only want to make one small point. John Scalzi suggest that some of the blame for the endangered state of health insurance reform lies at the feet of progressives, because progressives criticized the President and somehow weakened him, is just the same old “it’s always OK to punch a hippie” conventional wisdom.

When I look at progressives, what I see is that they have been trying whatever they can to enact real health care reform, not just pass any fucking thing, shovel money at the insurance industry middlemen, and call it good. I do not get how that translates into “weakening President Obama”, I just don’t.

Jane Hamsher has been trying to push through better legislation. Markos Moulitsas Zuniga pushed for better legislation. Many many more, that I’m too lazy to google and link, did the same.

Of course, Mr. Scalzi doesn’t actually specify who he means by “progressives”, which may be chalked up to his writing that post late in a sleepy frame of mind. Or it may just be a strawman argument and a reflexive “punch a hippie” attitude. I don’t know which. Mr. Scalzi strikes me politically as a “moderate”; he often tries to distance himself from what he sees as both right and left extremes. I’m definitely a progressive, way over here in Little Beirut.

But from the way I see it, criticizing a president only seems to “weaken” him if he’s a Democratic one. It’s always OK to do… whatever… when one is a Republican.

Still.


1 And I can. It’s my blog. Not being mean, just being real.

Yessir, the check is in the mail

Until I can get some time to write something down with a bit more creativity, I present to you a puzzle: Can you read this quote and not want to re-watch1 the movie from which it comes?

“Just remember what ol’ Jack Burton does when the earth quakes, and the poison arrows fall from the sky, and the pillars of Heaven shake. Yeah, Jack Burton just looks that big ol’ storm right square in the eye and he says, ‘Give me your best shot, pal. I can take it.'”

Well… can you?


1 Surely everyone who reads my blog has already seen this movie previously? More than once?

Refreshing fantasy

Right now I’m involved in two different Dungeons & Dragons games, which will mark me as a geek among the highest order. Which I’m quite proud of, so save your taunts and your barbs ’cause I will ignore them.

In one game, I am the Dungeon Master; I’ve written previously about that game and it has continued. In fact, we’re meeting again next Monday.

Tonight, though, I played in the other group. In this one, I’m a player, rather than running the game. Right now we have a group of five players, though we may be adding another player in the future.

I’ll spare you most of the details of the game and world, because I’m sure that listening to other folks describe their adventures is only interesting to a small handful of people. But the DM, Lynn,1 has made some interesting choices. He’s using an alternate historical setting, putting us in Europe around 950 C.E., with the additions of standard D&D tropes: magic-users, clerics with spells, elves and dwarves and orcs and goblins. Magic, though, is rare, and controlled by a group that owes ties to the Catholic church; and priests who cast spells and heal by touch are rarer still.

I got involved in the game on the idea that it would be a temporary gig; Lynn was writing a module for sale, and wanted a group to playtest it. So I was handed a character, one I did not create from scratch myself. That being the case, my character began a bit “vanilla” and outside my comfort range, but in playing him I’ve grown to like him and enjoy trying to put myself into his shoes. He’s a straight fighter, a swordsman of vaguely Germanic background, one who values the law and hierarchy and structure, and who gives at least lip service to the demands of the church.

He’s also a bit abrasive and tonight I discovered through play that he’s a bit of a misogynist, which I thought was a logical attitude for the times and considering his background, but led to a funny/awkward moment tonight when it bumped up against the rather modern ideas of our mixed-gender group.

We were investigating the disappearance of a local old maid who had disappeared, a cook who was renowned for her special herbed butter. When we searched her shack, she was gone, but Aoric, my swordsman, realized that the exotic and foreign herbs and spices were probably worth considerable gold coin, and began stuffing them into a bag. The priest, Father Caelin, and the elven nature-worshipper, Galithean, both admonished me for stealing. To which I replied, honestly if defensively, “It’s not stealing. She’s a woman.”

A shocked silence fell over the group. Including the DM.

I looked to the priest, sure he would agree with me (the player for the priest is well-versed in the historical context, much more than I am, surely he’d get it) but he just stared at me, eyes slitted.

“Oh,” I said, “even the priest is giving me the eye. Um, I’m just saving them for the old woman, so we can give them back to her if — I mean when — we find her again.” And if we don’t, I reasoned, I’ll just keep them and sell them.

The priest informed me that even though women couldn’t own land, they could still have posessions. In that moment, I had channeled my inner Jayne, and had found the nugget for my character.

Aoric’s moment of glory came later, when he dealt the death-blow to the Italian mercenary who had been hired to ambush and kidnap the Margrave’s son. It’s the first and so far most satisfying critical hit I’ve rolled since I took up playing again.

But I’d promised not to regale you with tales of the game. The major point I wanted to make, before wandering off into storytelling, was that after each game, whether I’m running the game or playing in it, I am refreshed. I’m laughing, I forget my troubles, I feel as though I’m connecting to the other players, and my mind is always filled with plans and memories. It’s amazing to me how energized I always feel for at least the next day or two.

I like playing, but it’s more than that. I like telling stories, but it’s more than that, too. The accomplishments are minor compared to the rest of my life, but I think being in a small party of like-minded folk, as opposed to being in a social gathering of strangers with nothing in common, is the circumstance under which I flourish. This is my favorite kind of interaction, and it makes me very happy.


1 In the game I DM, we have a player whose name is Lynn and she’s female. In the game I’m a player, the DM’s name is Lynn, and he’s male. I’ve messed up emails by sending them to the wrong Lynn before. It’s mildly embarrassing.

More self-improvement by running

I pushed myself a little bit last night during my run. I’ve been running on the treadmill at work for, oh, about the last four weeks or so, three times a week, like clockwork. And because running on the treadmill is so boring, about all I can stand is 30-40 minutes at a moderate pace (meaning 5.2 – 5.5 mph or so), which definitely taxes my cardio-vascular system but doesn’t seem to lead to improvement, as far as I can tell.

So starting last week, and continuing this week, I added a speed workout that I call the “ladder”.

Here’s how I worked it: five minutes at the normal pace to warm up, then 5 minutes at a “fast” pace, which meant 6 mph or a 10:00/mile pace. Then four minutes at the slower pace to rest, then four minutes at the faster pace, then three minutes rest and three minutes fast, and so on.

Last night, I actually slowed to a fast walk for most of the rest segments, which felt like cheating, but to make up for it, I increased the fast segments by 0.1-0.2 mph each fast segment, until the last one minute fast segment was at 6.6 mph (or about a 9:06/mile pace).

This morning, my legs feel a bit sore, which hasn’t happened in a while. I’m hopeful that means I will benefit from the speed workout in both stronger legs, and stronger cardio-vascular heart-beatin’ oxygen-breathin’ power.

Time will tell.

In related news, I’m still following the 100 pushups program, and this morning managed a set of 5/6/4/4/9, which is an incremental improvement over Monday’s set. Once this week’s exercises are done, I’m supposed to do another exhaustion test and then use that to re-calibrate. Not sure I’ll be able to do 20 in a row, still, like @mizd did, but I’ll manage more than 4, I’m sure.