iOS 4.1 came out yesterday, and I updated my iPhone 3G, which has been plagued with slowdowns and randomness since I updated it to 4.0.  It was almost so bad that I thought I was running a high-end Windows Mobile phone.  (Okay, not that bad.)  But it appears that the fixes in 4.1 alleviate any of the problems I was having, and everything is back to normal.  I can’t use the new game service, and it doesn’t multitask, both of which are not deal-breakers for me, since I need fewer things to waste time with, and I don’t care much about multitasking as long as I can switch between apps smoothly.  (Like for example, my Windows Mobile phone multitasked, but switching between applications was clunky and involved the virtual equivalent of the phone saying “oh yeah, hang on a second dude…” Switching between email and the web browser is faster on the iPhone, even if both of the applications are running and in memory in WM, the only difference being that in WM, you’re burning through the battery twice as fast.  And I used to constantly do stuff like switch out of Google Maps but not exit it, so it would still be running but not be visible, and by lunch my battery was dead.)

One of the things that enticed me though, and I can’t find any good information on it, is that you can supposedly use a bluetooth keyboard now with the iPhone.  I don’t know if you can on the 3G, or if the performance is decent, but if so, that gets me a step closer to the ideal travel computer setup.  I’ve always wanted some kind of thing where you had an iPhone-sized palm-based computer that you could pull out of your pocket to take a picture or play a song or jot down a note, but then when you sat down at a desk, you could pop it in a cradle or stand and hook up a keyboard and maybe a monitor, and you’d be able to work.

I think my obsession with this model was fueled by a week I spent in San Diego for a conference in 2000, when I only had my Palm Pilot IIIx with me.  It was before I owned a laptop, and probably the main reason I shelled out $5000 for a Dell Latitude in the beginning of 2001.  But this was when the Palm was a big deal, and every suit you see tooling around the airport with an iPad today was tooling around the airport with a Palm Pilot back in 2000.  You could actually go to a CompUSA and buy software for the Palm Pilot - actual shrinkwrapped, boxed, on-disk software.  I think back then, they had entire aisles of software, plus all of the cases, screen protectors, cables, docks, and other add-ons you could buy.  I did a lot of reading on the Palm, a lot of eBooks (which was ten years before the eBook was invented, according to current news reports).  I also played many, many rounds of Dope Wars, and found many hits of acid on a dead dude in the subway, when I happened to actually be on the subway.  But I never really wrote much on the Palm, because the stylus and the graffiti inking language never completely jived with me.  I can barely read my own handwriting, so learning a new handwriting system was out of the question.

I did no writing on the trip - I found a Borders instead and bought an armful of Philip K. Dick books to keep me busy.  But when I got home, I saw this little keyboard at CompUSA and immediately bought it.  The thing unfolded and you plugged your Palm Pilot into the lid, sort of like a makeshift cradle, and then typed away.  This thing was an awesome novelty for me for about three days, until I got bored of trying to write on the Palm Pilot and decided to start gardening in my kitchen or trying to collect crossbow parts off of eBay or whatever the hell else I did at that point in 2000.  This keyboard looked neat, and the folding lid was nifty, but the keys were like 95% sized, and my fat fingers kept hitting the wrong things.  Plus there was some weird delay of a tenth of a microsecond that made the user experience a bit sloppy.  And there were various ergonomic issues with having the keyboard immediately under a three inch screen, and the joined assembly bouncing around as you typed, unless you had a perfectly flat and stable surface to rest the whole thing on.

So would a bluetooth keyboard and an iPhone solve any of these problems?  I’m guessing you would have the same ergo issues unless you pumped the iPhone video into a big monitor.  And it’s not like I can run emacs on my phone, so I’m not going to be writing a 300,000 word book in the notes application.  Also, there’s the issue that the 3G is not a powerhorse cpu-wise, so even my lowly netbook is going to outpace it for desktop application performance.  And then I have the various sync issues; I can’t keep all of my writing on my home computer in a phone’s tiny flash memory.  I suppose I could concoct some scheme where all of my data lived in the cloud somewhere, but that doesn’t help me much at 40,000 feet with no cell tower in sight.  (Side note: man, I hate the term “in the cloud”.  It reeks of MBAism, something that was invented by a suit to describe a long-existing service and wrap it up in some hip and smarmy term that could be resold for more money. I mean, was my VAXNotes conference back in 1989 “in the cloud”? )

Maybe the iPad is part of that solution - you have a big screen, you can haul it around easy, you can plug in that keyboard cradle thing or pair up a bluetooth keyboard and write.  And everything I write here, even though it isn’t my primary writing repository, lives in a remote server and can be accessed by any machine with a reasonable web browser and a functional connection to the internet.  Wordpress has a halfway decent app on the iPhone, and if the iPhone glass keyboard wasn’t so slow for me, I could write on there.  (It works perfectly fine for web surfing, googling things, and the occasional two-sentence email message, but I can’t hack out a thousand words on it unless you gave me like eight hours and four Ativan tablets.)  All of this is much less important starting next week when my office is my home and my Mac is always within arm’s reach.  But it might be more important the first time I have to make a trip back east for work.

Speaking of, last day of the old job is today.  I thought about writing something giant and grand to sum up my feelings about that whole situation, but it’s complicated, so maybe later.  Probably not tomorrow though, given what happened nine years ago and all.

Okay, as I mentioned, a lot is up right now.  One of the big things is that my work geography is about to get very complex and very simple.  Let me try to explain.

I was essentially offered my old job in New York, with a couple of differences.  One is that I won’t work in New York - I will be working from home.  The other is that this company got bought by a much larger company last year, which means the whole playing field has changed.  But things will be simple in the sense that instead of spending roughly three hours a day commuting, I will spend roughly fifteen seconds walking down the stairs.  The complicated part is that I will be working for a company in Palo Alto as a California employee, but I will be working with a team that’s in my old digs in New York, but who also has a chunk of employees in Boston.  So the “where do you work” question technically has at least four answers.

And although I am in the Pacific time zone, I will be working Eastern time.  This isn’t a big deal for me; at the time I usually get ready to hop in my car and battle the 880, I will sit down at the computer and start working.  The real win is that I can wrap things up early in the afternoon and have a couple of hours to write and deal with various domestic duties which may or may not include Call of Duty.

As always, I’m sort of weird about discussing my work here, so no more details, although it’s not terribly hard to figure out.

The weird part of all of this is leaving Silicon Valley.  I mean, I technically won’t - I still have an office in Palo Alto, and I can still drive an hour or two and hang out there.  But I won’t be day-to-day down there.  It’s odd to think I’ve been doing this daily drive for two years now, and I’m still not that familiar with the area.  But I do love to see the big futuristic buildings, the chrome and glass towers and campuses that belong to companies that everyone has heard of, or to companies nobody even knows yet.  And then there’s the strip malls and rows of buildings that looked futuristic back in 1982, and now look like a beaten, middle-aged hooker, but are still rented out at a premium.  I wish I could quantify this architecture more, start a site about it, take lots of pictures of rustic earthtone trim and solid wood faceplates and old buildings labelscarred with removed SGI or DataGeneral logos.  But now that I’m not down there every day, that’s another project pushed to a deep back burner for now.

I now have a million other projects, including crap like where I will fit another computer, how I will run a new KVM, what ethernet hub or switch or other crap I will need to add to the home network, and how I will keep the cats away from me while I work.  And I’m fighting a low-grade cold, which will hopefully pass in another day or two.

But first, I get to go sit in the parking lot officially known as the Nimitz freeway for the next hour or two.  I better enjoy it while it lasts.

I am looking for a new desk setup.  I think this is pretty ideal, but I’m concerned about available space.  Also I don’t know if I have the right cable to hook my PS3 into this, and I’m sure it’s like $78 down at Best Buy.

I am currently using an Ikea desk that was obviously designed for double-leg-amputee midgets that work on a Fischer Price My First Computer that does not generate any heat.  I will start working from home next week, so I’m going to need more space for a second laptop, plus the cat that will most likely demand constant attention during the day and probably require some kind of cat shelf to be added to the desk.

Big fan of the Anthro cart, but I’ve never bought one - I wonder if it’s worth it to buy direct and get a discount, or try to find some resale place or a good deal on a used one.  I would go check eBay, but I know I will just end up spending five hours searching for signed baseball memorabilia and/or exotic sports cars (or even better, impersonator kits of exotic sports cars.  I wonder if the Fiero designers at Pontiac ever knew so many of their creations would be chopped, stretched, and reskinned as imposter Lambos and Ferraris.)

I always think it’s weird to look back at how drink containers have changed over a relatively short period of time.  Like, I think of 1993 as being pretty much the same as 2010 in many ways: no flying cars, no mind-melding machines, still had 50 states, Cubs still hadn’t won a World Series, etc.  But when I look at a picture that has a Coke bottle or a Pepsi logo, it seems like it has changed 100% from the current design.  Like this picture - it’s from the end of 2000, so it’s not ancient times, but that bottle looks entirely different from a current one: the background image, the angle of the lettering, the little details.  And it isn’t that often that I pick up a bottle and it’s 100% different, so it’s always these little tweaks that happen to font spacing or borders or something else that I never notice, until I look back ten years.

It’s even more strange in foreign countries.  I remember the first time I ever went to Canada, in 1988. I went to this Shakespeare festival in Strattford, Ontario with a bunch of people from my school.  (I don’t love Shakes like other drama nerds; it was a chance to miss a week of school and go to the country where Rush came from for something like $175 plus meals.  I half-expected to see Geddy Lee walking around a Tim Horton’s or Beer Store, but did not.)  I remember being in the lunch room of this weird nursing college where we stayed, putting a bunch of monopoly money coins (seriously, a dollar coin people use?) into a vending machine, and getting a can of Coke.  But it was all off, the size was like a millimeter or two the wrong way, the metal was a different thickness, or maybe it was steel instead of aluminum, and it wasn’t an honest-to-Jesus American twelve ounces; I think it was like 300 mL or 29 furlongs per parsec.  I could never wrap my head around that, and now every time I go to a foreign country, I take ten thousand pictures of every can and bottle I get my hands on.  If I went to Hiroshima in 1945 and the sky was still raining body parts and heavy water, I’d be snapping shots of a Japanese six-pack of Tab.

It’s weird now that I don’t drink regular Coke anymore.  My apartment and my desk at work used to be predominantly decorated with empty red cans of syrup-water, with the occasional desk or bed mixed in.  Now, I think the last time I drank a regular Coke must have been - I don’t even remember, maybe two years ago?  And now, a regular can of Coke looks almost alien to me.  We still have cases of the stuff at work, and I dig through them looking for a Diet Coke or Diet Pepsi (it’s all chemicals, I don’t really give a shit anymore) and the red looks weird compared to the silver non-calorie versions.

I have discovered I have hundreds of pictures of my injuries - every time I get a sunburn or a broken anything, I seem to take a dozen pictures of it.  Trying to think of some great montage to assemble.  If I was smart, I’d apply for an NEA grant with some huge bullshit artist statement about the healthcare crisis and how we are all art in a failing medical system, or whatever else.  Meanwhile, I find myself in the strange situation for the next month or so where I actually have double healthcare, two sets of insurance through the same provider even.  If I didn’t hate going to doctors so much, I would spend some serious time hopping from office to office, cashing in on this somehow.

In a perfect world, I’d have the One True iPhone app that would somehow take any of my stray ideas and easily catalog them in one place, that would let me collect all of these random thoughts and later develop them into sketches that got inserted into stories.  That app would have to use something more rapid-fire than the existing iPhone keyboard - a bluetooth keyboard I could always keep with me?  A way to do speech-to-text and also catalog photos I took?  Some way to beam text from any of the 19 computers I use during the day into the one repository?  Does this finally give me a good excuse to buy an iPad?  I don’t know.  Until then, there’s paper.  And for the last fifteen or so years since I became a writer, I’ve been amassing a lot of paper in a few different formats.

I used to use spiral notebooks, 8.5x11, college rule, and every night, I’d fill up a page or two with the doings of the day, the various things that happened, the pieces that stuck out and needed to be captured.  This was good in that I dumped out things and captured them in amber, but I also kept my writing going in some sense.  It’s no substitute for sitting down in front of an emacs buffer and hacking out a couple thousand words, but it keeps the wheels spinning.  Now I’ve got a few dozen of these sitting in my bookcase and in my storage unit, and at some point, I might do something with them.  (Wish there was an easy and cheap way to scan them all in, but I hate my current scanner, and it also stopped working when I got the new laptop.)  This method pretty much stopped a few years ago - I think I still have the same notebook I started in 2006, and it’s not going to ever get filled at this rate.  This online journal and the need to write other stuff has pretty much killed that whole thing.

But I still need to keep notes.  And I’ve been using those moleskine notebooks, although I still don’t know how the hell you actually say moleskine, and the first time I have to say it aloud to another human being, I’m going to look like a genius.  There’s also some worry about the fact that I might look like a hipster doofus, carrying around one of these things.  But I don’t live in Brooklyn, so it’s no big deal.  And my new laptop bag (which I already hate, after my last trip, and I really need to get another one) has a pocket on the front which is the perfect size for two moleskine books and a pen.  So I’ve been filling one up lately, and I think since I started a new one in mid-July, it’s maybe half-full already.

So I was in Denver, and I got this small routine going where I’d get up early, go down to the restaurant in the hotel, and eat breakfast outside, while enjoying the cool Denver morning prelude to the afternoon heat.  And I’d eat my eggs and toast and fruit, and pick at my iPhone and the email a bit, and pick at the notebook a bit, maybe write down part of a weird dream or an idea for a story.  And then after breakfast, I’d go sit down in the hotel lobby with my netbook and crack out a thousand or two words.

After the first day of this, I realized my notebook was missing.  I freaked the fuck out, of course.  Did I put my name in it?  My number?  Was it downstairs in the lobby?  Would it turn up, or would someone just think “oh, cool” and pocket it, tearing out a month of golden entries and destroying my work forever?

But my greastest fear was, if the book does turn up, will someone start reading it?  Because here’s the thing: my notes are so god damned random and bizarre, any sane human reading them would think they found the unfinished manifesto of a deranged serial killer.  Like, if you open this notebook and turn to the first page, there’s this rough idea about Evel Kneviel carrying around an iPad that contains scans of all of his xrays from his various motorcycle crash injuries.  No idea what anyone would think about any of this.  Luckily, my handwriting is so horrible, it would be difficult for anyone to pick up on anything within the book.  But still, losing that would be a huge, huge deal.

Luckily, I went back to the front desk, and someone turned it in.  Crisis averted.  Now I can continue pouring raw thoughts into the pages.  I’m still not sure what the process will be for doing anything meaningful with the notes on the other side.  Like, maybe I will fill the whole thing up, then sit down with emacs open and transcribe the pages into a buffer, and then later try to tag up or expand each of the little nodes of thought and let it go from there.  Or maybe I should find some place that will scan all of this crap into a useable digital format, although I’m sure it would cost a buck a page, and the book would have to leave my hands, which makes me bunchy.  And evernote times a thousand could not figure out my handwriting, so I still have to read it and type it.  More research to do there.

Side note: I have been going through old entries here and titling them.  There are almost a thousand entries total, going back to 1997, and maybe a couple hundred of them are titled.  The old pre-wordpress system I used up until last year did not have a title field, and so everything I imported had a blank title.  I’ve been wanting to add titles to everything, because there’s a cool plugin that shows you a bunch of random entries, but it shows them by title, so you can’t click on most of them.  As I’ve been doing this, which is a huge pain in the ass, I’ve been doing some very minor cleanup and tagging, and there were a couple of entries I deleted.  No major self-censorship trip, I just nipped the entries that were one sentence and said stuff like “I just changed the site - tell me if there are any problems” or whatever else.

Still on the mad push to 1000 entries.  I wish I knew how many words that was - I’m sure there is a wordpress hack or plugin to figure that out, but I’m too busy to find it, and this Call of Duty game won’t play itself.