On Getting an iPad

My iPad arrived the day before yesterday, making a UPS journey from mainland China to Hong Kong, to Alaska, Tennessee, and Ontario, where it was loaded onto a truck and driven to my door. Free shipping. Some day I must check out the itinerary of bananas from the plantation to my cereal bowl.

The problem is, there are no fresh words left to describe it. Awesome? Too 80′s. Brilliant? Too 90′s. Mind boggling? Too clichéd. Supercalifragilistic? Even the short form is too difficult to spell. The word that works best for me is the humble personal.

The term personal computer, in use since IBM launched the PC in 1982, may have at last found an exemplar in the iPad. When I hold it in my hands or on my lap, whether I’m reading an ebook or checking email, I feel it’s somehow part of me, like the clothes I wear or my hair style. Most computers, even netbooks, have a formality about them. Smartphones and iPods, no matter how cool or useful, feel like gadgets. Computers and gadgets. The iPad feels like neither.

Slightly more aloof than a dog, more friendly than a cat, cuter than a guinea pig, the iPad insinuates itself into your life before you’ve owned it 48 hours. I’ve never met another technology I’ve merged with so seamlessly. Even a new bicycle takes a week or so to become an extension of your legs and balance.

Let’s say the iPad was launched approximately five months ago and that Apple is selling, by most estimates, a million units a month. That would make me about the five millionth iPad owner. No wonder it’s hard to find anything fresh to say.

I already have some favourite apps. GoodReader is a better PDF reader than I have on my Macbook. The Kindle App allows me to move easily between my iPad and Kindle, on the same book. Elements gives me a text editor that syncs files with Dropbox. It includes a word-count function and a scratch pad for recording extraneous thoughts and ideas. The built-in Mail program is excellent. The Video program would rate an excellent if it supported AVI video files. With MP4′s it’s a great viewer. Safari is Safari. Relatively solid but unable to display the contents of certain sites.

Perhaps my most unusual app, to date, is a story. More than an ebook, even an enhanced ebook, it’s a multimedia presentation called Pedlar Lady of Gushing Cross, created by British Columbia company Moving Titles. A modern fairy tale, delightfully written, narrated, and animated. It’s a showcase app for where computing might be headed.

Forty-Eight hours and I’m nearly purring. It’s that good.

Experimental Photography

When I was in university, taking photo courses, I enjoyed the “experimental” assignments that could range from anything from photo collages to shadowgrams. My classmates must have been equally inspired because they produced some excellent photographic art. All of us were influenced by Jerry Uelsmann.

Back then experimental photography was tough to produce because everything had to be constructed in a darkroom using an enlarger and photographic paper. With the advent of Photoshop, and other digital editors, things that used to take days can be done in minutes.

What’s even more remarkable is that several companies create Photoshop add-ins that supplement the art filters already in Photoshop. You can get psychedelic, oil painting, orton effect, and dozens of other artistic filters that can create photographic art with the click of a button.

The question is, if it’s this easy, is it art? It’s a disputable point. I’ve seen some “paint-by-numbers” photographic art that isn’t very pleasing, and I’ve seen photos enhanced with filters that look terrific.

So, the art question aside, what makes an effective presentation using art filters? I think it mainly depends on the original photo. Some photos, due to composition, subject, and innate colour, lend themselves to art-filter experiments. In all cases, these would also make good straight photographs. Experimenting with them can give them greater impact.

From my own work using filters, often multiple filters, I find I have to get just the right subject. That, however is no guarantee. You never know until you begin making the changes.

I’ve tried many experiments that never got to “Save As” in Photoshop. Although they might have been interesting, they didn’t ring true. Some products, like Topaz Adjust, can over-exaggerate effects creating works that don’t stand up well. These I simply abandon. Which is not to say Topaz Adjust isn’t useful — it simply needs to be used with a light touch.

I’ve been having fun lately with a somewhat over-the-top, free plugin for Photoshop CS5, available from the Adobe website. Called Pixel Bender, it can produce some mind-boggling effects. Also some beautiful ones. The Oil Paint module, in particular, does a magnificant job.

Both photos in this posting were done with Pixel Bender Oil Paint, plus some tweaks involving masking, levels adjustments, and a spot of sharpening here and there.

As always, I know I’ll be returning to straight photography, my favourite kind. But it never hurts to take an experimental side path to shake up the neurons a bit to fire off some creativity. Even if it’s highly augmented with click-a-pic filters.

Five by Five

How am I doing? “Five by five”

This was the strange, meaningful-sounding, but-no-one’s-quite-sure comment given by Faith, the other vampire slayer, whenever anyone asked. If it’s good enough for Faith, it’s good enough for me.

Actually, except for the way-too-warm summer, things have been fine. Photography has been in a slump during the warm weather, but reading’s gone way up. I just finished Stephen King’s Under the Dome, and enjoyed it hugely. It’s a page turner.

I read it on my Kindle, which I think attests to the Kindle’s readability. In print form I’m told it’s a 1000-page novel.

I’ve been writing like mad for the past 4-6 weeks. I had four magazine assignments due nearly all at the same time. Last night I filed three of them and I have a week to finish the fourth. My favourite was a feature article on e-books and e-publishing written for Here’s How! Once it’s in print, I’ll provide a link.

In other news, I’ve ordered an iPad and expect to take delivery around Aug 30. I’m curious to see how it compares to the Kindle as an e-book reader, but I got it as reading, writing, and entertainment gadget. A reward to myself for hitting my deadlines.

Summer viewing fare has been thin, although I did catch up on a couple of older movies: Dirty Harry and The Exorcist. It was my first time viewing for both. I also re-watched a couple of classics: My Fair Lady and Blowup. I watched the entire TV series Twin Peaks, and though it rather fell apart part way into season two, overall I enjoyed it. The music haunts me.

We’re into the part of summer I hate the most (I don’t like summers in general). The dead zone. The zombie zone. The period between when nothing happens and school begins. For me September has always been the start of the year.

Not that I’m taking any classes. I have enough learning on my plate in terms of new computer programs. I purchased the Adobe Design Standard PS5 suite and now have the make the transition from PageMaker 4 to InDesign PS5. I should pick up a little Illustrator while I’m at it. The core of the package, for me, is Photoshop CS5, and it has enough new features to keep me learning for quite awhile.

The only disappointment I have of late is my lack of any creative writing projects. I hope to fix that soon. I have a couple of creative nonfiction pieces I want to work on. Maybe when the iPad arrives …

Creating e-Clippings

Cover of sample article e-clipping:

One of my banes, as a writer, is that I often write for publications that don’t feature an online edition of their issues. Among other things, this makes it difficult to have small moments of “writer’s pride” by sending someone a link to a new story. A parallel bane is that I’ve accumulated a large number of clippings and magazines I’ve appeared in, and I have no way to share them.

It occurred to me, as I’m sure it has to others, that this problem could be addressed by making digital photocopies available via a scanner, using PDF format. These can be posted online as examples of my writing, with the added benefit that PDF’s print well when I want a hard copy.

It only took a small leap for me to realize that if I had the entire magazine, I could also photocopy its front cover to provide a visual reference context to the article, the way Amazon includes an image of the cover of a book.

There may be some rights issues embedded in this method of exhibiting my work, but I suspect it’s largely theoretical. I can think of few publishers or advertisers who would mind their artwork or ads getting a bit more viewing by readers. It’s what they strive for.

After a number of experiments, here’s what I’ve developed as an approach:

1. Scan the magazine pages at 150 dpi (dots per inch) in jpeg format. 300 dpi looked good but made for very large files and downloads. 75 dpi looked scruffy both on screen and on printouts.

2. Create a cover page in a word processor that can also handle graphics. I use NeoOffice on the Mac, a variant of Open Office. Word should work just as well.

3. Insert the scanned jpeg images, each on a newly created empty page.

4. Save the original word-processing file, then export the file to PDF.

5. Place the PDF on your website so you can send out links. Preferrably, include a titles page on your site so those looking at your credentials as a writer can check out some of your work.

That’s it. Well not quite. Back up your files to other media. Take one copy offsite for additional protection.

You can sample my first online test of concept here: Digital Reading.

If you have additional ideas about creating e-clippings and e-reprints, I’d love to hear about it. Contact me at gene.wilburn@gmail.com.

A Morning at the Park

We place our lawn chairs beside the small stream in Saddington Park, underneath gnarled, elvish willows, our backs to the lake. Marion unpacks her art supplies and lines them up on the ground, then begins sketching. I switch on my Kindle and begin reading “The Gold Bug” by Edgar Allan Poe. It’s another of the endless stream of classics I neglected in my youth.

Male redwings shout their shrill, aggressive calls nearby, chasing intruding birds that venture into “their” territory. Female redwings sneak through the undergrowth. It’s mid June and they have youngsters hiding from view. The Redwings may have staked this as their spot, but no one owns a stream and other birds fly into the trees and down to the water.

Momentarily losing my concentration on Poe, I begin inventorying birdsong. A red-eyed vireo belts its pretty but incessant affirmations from overhead, high in the treetops. A mockingbird cycles through its extensive repertoire. A male robin joins in, then a male cardinal. Then a nuthatch and a song sparrow. Just beyond the trees rough-winged swallows and barn swallows swoop and tumble noiselessly through the air, speeding like stealth fighters, nailing insects in mid flight.

Marion stands for a moment, stretches, then takes a couple of limping steps. She gets bursitis in the region of her replacement hip, and her other hip is deteriorating. Osteoarthritis — painful, insistent. I stretch too, stiff, sore. In our mid 60′s our health is relatively good, but age is telling. We feel young, but the internal scaffolding is wearing out.

As Marion turns to the lake, she sees someone on a plank with a sail attached. We both grope after the word for it but can’t bring the name back to memory. Something like “sail plane” but we know that’s not quite right. I turn on the Kindle’s wireless and search Wikipedia. Nope, a sail plane is a glider, but I stumble across “sail board” and “sail boarding.” That’s it. We do crossword puzzles every day to try to stave off memory loss. It helps … a little.

Back to the stream. Marion finishes her initial pencil sketches and starts applying watercolour. I return to the tale of the gold scarab beetle and its deepening plot. What has possessed Mr. William Legrand? Jupiter, his black serving man, thinks the gold bug is bad mojo. The narrator thinks Legrand may be going insane. Jupe is now up an ancient tulip tree, at Legrand’s insistence, and finds a skull nailed to the seventh branch. The plot is twisting.

As we sit quietly, a pair of mallards silently paddle into view where the stream widens at this spot under the willows. They stop to preen. A redwing chases out a grackle. The vireo never stops singing. For some while little insects have been alighting on my hands and arms, occasionally ambling across the Kindle’s screen. I look more closely at them: there are three kinds leafhopper nymphs, all of them green. The largest is about the length of the quick of my thumbnail and is a brilliant uniform green — katydid green. The middle one is darker green, with black stripes. The smallest is a uniform muddy green. All of them look much the same, except for size and colour. Then, in the middle of the green, a red speck strolls across my hand to the kindle and across its top. A red mite.

Suddenly I need a cuppa. I check with Marion and she too would like a hot drink. And a bagel. There’s a Starbucks about a fifteen-minute walk from the stream, so I switch off the Kindle, leaving the story near its climax. I’ll savour it more once I’m caffeinated. Besides, I need the exercise. I had a good physical exam on my 65th, but my doctor chided me a bit on my waistline and weight. As I’m a heart patient, he advised me to slim down.

At the Starbucks counter I learn that someone came in earlier and bought up all the bagels. I remember seeing a ferris wheel appear suddenly across the bridge at the local library. Waterfront Festival. The carnival people have just arrived and set up, which probably accounts for the run on bagels. I pick up a grande mild coffee and a grande black tea and slice of lemon poppyseed cake for Marion. With luck she’ll offer me a bite.

I walk back to the stream and the redwings and the lawnchairs. We sip our hot drinks and I finish “Gold Bug.” Although the prose is from another era, Poe was an immensely creative writer. It was a very good read.

Marion adds black ink “highlights” to her watercolour, bringing out more of its structure. As usual, she dismisses her work, but I like it. Like most artists, she undervalues her talent.

Soon we wrap up. Marion puts away her brushes, pens, and pencils while I attempt to take a macro shot of one of the leafhopper nymphs with my little digicam. They move too quickly and appear blurry in the viewing panel, so I delete the pix. We fold our lawn chairs, carry our trash to the bins, and return to the car in the parking lot, bidding adieu to the park until next time.

In Praise of Project Gutenberg

So, when was the first time you encountered ebooks? For many folk, it was when they got their first Palm PDA, iPhone, or Blackberry. I think everyone has the same reaction: Wow! Thousands of free books available for the downloading. Here’s what you may not know: nearly all of them come from the most enlightened volunteer project of our era: Project Gutenberg.

Project Gutenberg (abbreviated as PG) has created over 30,000 documents since its establishment by Michael S. Hart. Its first document was posted online in 1971.

Whoa! 1971? That was before many of today’s ebook readers were born. PG is the oldest digital library and it continues actively to this day.

I first encountered PG in 1978, using a VueComm terminal and 110 BAUD modem to connect to Unix on a PDP-11 at the Zoology Department of the University of Toronto. It was a “huh!” moment. I was able to ftp Hamlet and Pride and Prejudice and read them on the terminal.

Since 1971 volunteers around the world have laboriously typed in, scanned in, or read in the full texts of public domain books. Other volunteers proofread the results before releasing the titles. In 1971 all books were plain text, allowing them to be read on terminals connected to mini and mainframe computers.

Nowadays PG releases books in plain text, HTML, PDF, EPUB, MOBI, and Plucker formats. The “free” books you get for the Kindle, Sony Reader, Kobo Reader, iPhone, iPad, etc., are mostly obtained from the vast PG library. The titles are primarily English language but there’s an increasing number of non-English books.

The PG collection is certainly heavy on classics of literature, history, and philosophy, but it also has mysteries, science fiction and fantasy, westerns, romances, and nonfiction books, including cookbooks. You can also find copies of old periodicals at the Project Gutenberg site.

All you need to enjoy a good PG book is a computer or handheld device with e-reader software.

What a marvellous project. I say “kudos!” And I say, if you’re the contributing type, PG could use your time and/or donations to keep the project moving. You can help them continue the work of preserving world culture.

Project Gutenberg is located at www.gutenberg.org

For ease of downloading, a great site that carries PG material is manybooks.net

Does the Kindle Contain Steroids?

I’ve owned the 6-inch Amazon Kindle Global Wireless for about 15 days as I write this, and I’d never have guessed how much reading I’m doing. In terms of novels or novellas, I’m reading, or have finished:

The Man Who Was Thursday, G.K. Chesterton
The Thirty-Nine Steps, John Buchan
The Call of the Wild, Jack London
The Shadow Out of Time, H.P. Lovecraft
A History of Terraforming, Robert Reed (Asimov’s, July 2010)
Triplanetary, E.E. “Doc” Smith
The Unparalleled Adventures of One Hans Pfaal, E.A. Poe

In addition I’ve read short stories by Poe, Conan Doyle, and Charles de Lint, plus whatever else is in Asimov’s July 2010.

Current nonfiction on the go:

Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin, Stephen Jay Gould
Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction: Work from 1970 to the Present, Edited by Lex Williford and Michael Martone (just finished the marvellous essay, “The Search for Marvin Gardens,” by John McPhee)
The Smashwords Style Guide, Mark Coker
Walden, Henry David Thoreau
On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin

With nonfiction, I tend to read bits at a time, usually a chapter or another logical unit.

The Kindle, as evidenced by the above, has put steroids into my reading habits. The only downside so far, I’ve been neglecting my math studies for the past few days.

Why Kindle?

What I asked for, and received, for my birthday, was an Amazon Kindle, the 6-inch screen international model sold to Canadians.

Several of my friends told me they were surprised I didn’t go for an iPad. Given my penchant for tech toys, it’s a legitimate observation. Here’s my attempt at an explanation.

First, let me say I have nothing but admiration for the iPad. I’ve held one and had a good look at it. I also have an iPod Touch I use frequently, which, I believe, provides me with a smaller but similar experience to the iPad.

Though it may be counter-intuitive, it’s the iPod Touch experience that dampened my enthusiasm for the iPad. The reason is that it can do too many things.

When a technology provides multiple things that can be done with it, I’m the kind of person who tends to hop from thing to thing, enjoying each goodie. I add programs. I do my email. I check blog sites. I solve a sudoku. You know the drill.

Everything about the iPad is leading edge and is justly praiseworthy. However, I’ve confirmed many times over that, for me, trailing-edge technologies that offer less sometimes deliver more.

Take word processors, for example. Though they do many things well, including decent page layout, I do all my professional and personal writing in plain text editors. I import them into a word processor to pass along to editors, but I get more done with simple text editors. They’re less distracting, and the files are superbly portable.

Another example is the AlphaSmart Neo. It’s essentially little more than an electronic typewriter with a great keyboard and a small LCD screen. It stores files as text files and squirts them into computer programs via a USB cable. When I have the Neo along, instead of the Touch or the netbook, the only option I have is writing. And I write more, with better concentration.

Turn this to reading, and I had a hunch that the Kindle would result in my spending more time reading e-books than an e-book reader on a multipurpose device. The Kindle essentially does only one thing, and does it well. It provides a good reading screen, simple controls, great battery life, and the ability to annotate and make notes.

I’ve had the Kindle less than five days and I’ve already read two novels and am halfway through another. I’ve also read several short stories. It’s light enough to hand hold while I’m lying in bed.

There are drawbacks to the Kindle, or any e-Ink e-book reader such as the Sony Reader. They don’t display colour. Although the Kindle will display PDFs they’re hard to read. The Kindle is not well adapted to newspaper formats, with fancy columns.

But feed it straight text–the kind you get in stories and essays–and it allows you to see right through the device itself, into the flow of the text. That is, it provides a good reading experience.

I don’t chase best sellers, so contemporary e-books aren’t a high priority for me, though they’re available. What I like is downloading Project Gutenberg copies of free e-books from sites such as manybooks.net that offer them in just about any popular e-book format, including Kindle’s native AZW format.

So far I’ve read John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps, G.K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday, and I’m well into H.P. Lovecraft’s The Shadow Out of Time. I’ve been reading short stories by Poe, and the Sherlockian adventures of Conan Doyle. There are thirty or so more books waiting in line.

Do I like the Kindle? Very much! Sometimes less is more.

The Look It Up Club

Here’s something I wrote, inspired by the challenge “look up.” It’s not meant to be profound — just a light bit of memoir.

The Look It Up Club

Beside the Rock River, downstream from Rock Falls and upstream from Rock Island, nestles the small farm town of Lyndon, Illinois. Perhaps not so much nestles as puzzles, wondering what happened. When first founded, Lyndon was designated as the capitol of Whiteside County, but shortly after, the county seat was moved to the bustling town of Morrison. Lyndon, meanwhile, nestled and swelled to a population of 600, given a generous rounding up by the census bureau.

When my family shifted residence from the booming blue-collar town of Rock Falls to a small farm outside of Lyndon, there was another shift in the wind. The Top-Ten radio stations that featured Perry Como, Tennessee Ernie, and a fresh young balladeer, Pat Boone, were being infiltrated by a new sound, from artists like Elvis, Buddy Holly and the Crickets, and the Big Bopper. Changes were afoot. Who’d have thought you could have a Number One hit with a song about a hound dog?

Changes were coming to the classroom too. In my schoolroom where the combined grades five and six were ably juggled by the legendary Mrs. Emmonds, who had taught most of my classmates’ parents, a mystery man appeared one day. Lyndon School had purchased the World Book Encyclopedia, a new publication aimed at elementary students. The mystery man was evidently part of the deal. He stayed on from Monday to Friday, with one period a day devoted to the gleaming white workbooks distributed to each of us. We were suddenly pledges in the World Book-sponsored Look It Up Club. By looking up and answering all the questions in the workbook, we became official members, each of us receiving a piece of paper with Look It Up Club at the top and our name on it, gracefully penned in by Mrs. Emmonds.

When your top entertainment includes throwing rocks at snapping turtles at Walker’s Slough, sipping coke and listening to the hound dog song on the jukebox in the Sip’n'Bite Cafe, and watching the high school basketball team lose another game, the World Book came on like fireworks. It was full of dazzling color: maps, photos, diagrams. It told you where things were, like Rhodesia and Ceylon. It had diagrams of how things worked, like electric toasters and automotive gear shafts. It was amazing, and understandable. It was the World Wide Web in a set of volumes with pebbly covers that made you want to pick them up. The only thing more exciting was the annual summer week at scout camp.

That was a long time ago, 1955 or 56 — a different era. Yet the population of Lyndon has remained constant to this day. Given that most of us left after our school years, the constancy is a bit of a mystery. I sometimes surmise there’s a kind of psychic warp where the river bends in Lyndon, compelling newcomers to settle there, maintaining the balance. That means new kids to educate. Kids sprouting ear buds, carry iPods to school. Kids who never heard of Rhodesia or Ceylon, but who occasionally listen to a “classic oldie” about a hound dog.

Kids more aware of things, who would never find the World Book a match for the World Wide Web, and who would likely think the Look It Up Club hokey. As Heraclitus aptly stated: “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.”

“Looking Up”

The excellent NaBloPoMo site features a monthly challenge for writing and photography blogs. The May 2010 challenge is Look Up, interpreted any way you wish. Because my photography has lapsed in the last while, due mainly to lack of imagination, I decided to take up the May challenge as a way to jog my seeing.

I don’t shoot upwards much. Being 6′ 1″ I normally have to shoot downward and being nearly 65 I’m not eager to get down on my belly to take shots. As any oldster will tell you, it’s the getting back up that’s difficult.

Fortunately my Panasonic G1 m-4/3 camera has a tilt and swivel display that allows me to use the camera Rolleiflex TLR style, looking down at the viewfinder. I can get down on one knee and place the camera on the ground, then frame and focus. It’s less challenging that a full body crawl.

I’ll post my results here periodically. The top picture in this post is looking up at the birdbath in my backyard. The bottom picture is looking up at a dandelion, from ground position.