Month One Done Done One Month One Month Done Done Month One Done One Month




Sorry I haven’t written in a while. I’ve gone a bit longer without a post than I’d care to but I have been working…Sleeping, no, but working yes, I promise. The conversations I’ve had ought to keep me motivated for a while yet. I’ve also been doing a lot of reading lately, mainly of other peoples blogs during which I saw an interesting quote, “I used to write to be read, now I write to be written.” I think this quote speaks volumes about the people who open themselves up via text. I personally have always written to be written, but I don’t suppose being read is bad either. I mean If I didn’t want to be read I’d never post, or I’d turn off the comments section. So for the person who wrote that quote I certainly hope she never wasted her time putting something down on paper, just so others would read it, but I’m glad she has found the true purpose of this medium. Lets not forget the whole point of learning to write in the first place (ie: cavemen’s paintings) is to move away from an oral history and provide a means of conveying information more accurately, there will always be an element of writing that is meant for reading, even if that audience is just yourself at a later date.

I was having a conversation with a friend of mine, who I love and respect but the end result of our talk was that he wasn’t making any sense. None.At.All. This past week brought with it, the debut of the much hyped Apple iPad. A tablet, style device that has long been thought to usher in the future of personal computing. The backlash in this new post-twitter ubiquity was fast and harsh. Many people now use various high end computing devices in their everyday life and with the new Android technology revolutionizing the cell phone market, coupled with the dividing line between phone, PDA, and game boy fading quickly, the pace to keep up is blinding at best. So the conversation mostly centered on the idea that the marketing of this new “tablet” was done all wrong. Everyone who saw the iPad debuted immediately compared it to whatever device they were using, saw that what they had was better and thought less of the tablet instantly. Not that they were wrong, the iPad doesn’t do more than most devices like it, however the argument I was hearing was that this new tablet wasn’t supposed to try and measure up. It was meant for those with disposable income, who could use it around the home or office as a way to simply meander around the internet and do idle tasks while killing time during a commercial, or while listening to jazz on the veranda, reading the latest Loretta Chase novel while sipping moscato. I’m sure by now you’ve realized you never do anything that I’ve just described but there are many Americans who do, and I’m sure they mostly live in Cupertino, Ca where Apple is based, and even more of them are neighbors of Steve Jobs who Macheads worship like some sort of high wasted jean wearing, fashion inept, bespectacled jesus. So my end of the argument went like this… Lets say that yes, in theory there is some market large enough to warrant pumping out these $800 slices of Apple genius. And making them will open up a “new” way of thinking. Instead of lugging the cumbersome 13-inch macbook or paper thin macbook air you just shelled out $2000 USD for, why not plop down a measly $800 and then when you google the answer to Jeopardy questions or look up those esoteric references Dennis Miller always makes during the O’Reilly factor to see if they’re real or not, (they’re not) you won’t have to pull out that clumsy iPhone and type on the tiny pad. Still after saying all that is it really worth it to make a device so devoid of even the simplest technological advancements? I don’t think so. Now of course there are two things I know about Apple. One is that they start production on things 5 years in advance. This is a big reason I know the second thing about them, they always add updates to models billed as cutting edge. The way things expand these days, there’s just no way they could wait for technology to plateau. Instead they’ve made a business model around making a new device and then updating it in subsequent generations. At the very least I'm asking that they partner with In-N-Out to bring us the first ever iLunch, so that I could just use the Bump app on my (pronounced: your) iPhone with the girl walking around outside expediting to add my order to the queue while in the line of cars thats 37 deep.

But I still haven’t discussed why my friend made no sense. The laundry list of thing’s I could say this device should have, are not things we haven’t developed yet. Sure this new toy may be useful to a small segment of people on an even smaller number of occasions but does that mean we should just accept this device as what it is? Even my little brothers cell phone can stream Pandora music AND send an email. Why can’t the iPad? It’s very hard to convince me that when something sucks it’s ok because it was designed to suck. My college roommate once tried to tell me that signing A-Rod to ANOTHER $260 Million dollar deal was smart because he’d break the all time Home Run record as a Yankee that way. What he failed to realize was that it didn’t matter what he did as an individual to the fans, and at that point he had been single handedly murdering the Yankee’s playoff runs with poor batting performances. It wasn’t okay for A-Rod to suck then and it’s not ok for the iPad to suck now. I’m not saying the business friendly upgrades people are asking for are not going to happen or that Apple is wrong in trying to open up a new market, but right now they’re either holding back with these upgrades and waiting to include those features in future updates or simply not trying at all. Neither or which is ok by me.

I went to a different hospital today and I’m UNIMPRESSED. UCLA not only has the sentimental value but is simply a better facility. It makes me glad I won’t have to go to this new place as often as I went to Regan. In the future I hope I can find a way to get my medical team back to UCLA. After seeing the way things are, I feel like someone cut off their nose to spite their face, and I have a feeling it might not have been just the bigwigs at UCLA.

There’s a new badge on the right hand side that will take you to a site I belong to. It’s basically a writer’s convention where people bounce ideas off one another and build their brand. The new stuff I’m working on for me is going to take a back seat until I think I have a better grip on the Wet Bean and Cheese and the stuff over at 20sb, but by my birthday I hope to be ready to start back with that.



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