You see, an iPhone makes sense: It combines a bunch of gadgets in one device. For me, it’s the music player in my car, a navigational system (thanks to the TomTom cradle and Navigon software), it’s a mobile gaming console and Internet gadget and you can even make phone calls with it. An iPhone makes sense.

A notebook also makes sense: It’s a real mobile computer, not just some restricted mobile device with a touch screen interface.

Anyway. It didn’t take full 24 hours before I had my first feeling of buyer’s remorse. 500 bucks is a lot of money in my world. It’s what I paid for my two dogs when I got them, for example. It’s what a -real- PC notebook costs. It’s almost a month’s rent. It’s a lot of food for my family. It’s a lot of oil for the winter. If you spend that money, you better get something for it.

Don’t get me wrong. I like spending money for toys. But somehow, the iPad just didn’t feel right. How shall I describe it? It felt a big like buying an executive class notebook just because you want to feel like upper management, but in reality you’re only the person who cleans the boss’s office in the evening. Or think of buying a huge, high-end TV that you put in a living room with moth-infested furniture. You know, that sort of not feeling right. Buying something shiny and expensive that has no place or justification or even remotely a purpose in your life. That’s how the iPad felt. And that’s the main reason why it’s going back to Apple while I’m still in the 14-days grace period to return it (which in Germany, by the way, is governed by law and not just a good will thing from Apple).

Here’s a couple of things that were fun with the iPad (and which are also fun with the iPhone): Playing Shredder chess and Plants vs Zombies. Safari was a much better experience with the iPad than it is with the iPhone. In all honesty, using a web browser on a mobile phone is a cynical joke, but nothing you want to do every day. With the iPad, it’s more or less okay, but I -DID- miss Flash, simply because most websites that have embedded video clips rely on Flash. It’s a simple fact of life, no matter how much Steve Jobs wants to justify the lack of support for Flash on his iGadgets. This will change over the next couple of years, sure, but it doesn’t really help you today.

Typing on the iPad is a nightmare for me. The on screen keyboard sucks when you’re used to typing (fast) with ten fingers, as I am. It just doesn’t work for me. Which leaves me with the fact that apps like Pages are practically useless when you don’t use an external keyboard. And when you are going to use an external keyboard, you’re already better off with a real notebook. This is not what the iPad was made for. Or was it?

Anyway. Your individual mileage will vary, and maybe you have a niche for the iPad in your life. Except for owning another shiny electronic toy with an Apple logo on it, I didn’t.

Update: I’m also trying to return the software purchases for the iPad. Apple isn’t making it easy; I have to “report a problem” for each individual app purchase. Well, let’s see how that one will turn out.

Update 2: The folks at Apple are fast. They agreed to refund me for two apps, but they declined the remaining dozen or so requests. Anybody reminded of the Mapple store episode from The Simpsons? “…while our true policy is: No refunds!” Well, I am.

http://www.iphonehacks.com/2010/07/how-to-downgrade-iphone-3g-from-ios-4-to-iphone-os-3-1-3.html

Actually, my phone is still syncing while I’m typing this, but it appears that so far everything went well.

UPDATE:

Forget my comment about copy & paste not being possible between apps. I found out today that it actually is possible and I copied stuff from Pages to OmniGraffle or from Keynote to Pages and vice versa. So it does work. I probably was just too dumb to get it right the first time.

Some Open Source fanatics have always spread the FUD that developers should not use Mono because Microsoft could club their projects and products with their patents for C# and .NET. After Sun put most of Java under the GPL, those very same people in their infinite wisdom advised developers to use Java instead.

And now we see Oracle suing Google for patent infringements over Java.

Isn’t that ironic?

Open Source does not protect anybody from patent lawsuits. Patents are there to protect ideas and concepts, while copyright laws protect specific implementations and products. So even if a product is made available under an Open Source license, that does not keep you out of harm’s way when your precious Open Source product infringes on somebody else’s patents.

(As a reminder, that’s what ridiculed the “Show us the source!” campaign that some folks were running against Microsoft a couple of years ago — they simply didn’t know what they were talking about. Microsoft was talking about patent infringements and the folks behind the campaign had trivial copyright infringements in mind. Two different pairs of shoes. You don’t need to copy source code in order to infringe on a patent. You just need to write your OWN implementation of a patented IDEA or CONCEPT. Do you get it?)

Here’s my advice: Use Mono instead of Java. Microsoft made sufficient promises in the past not to run around with a patent club against Mono, and Novell made sufficient promises to protect their customers against such patent lawsuits. When you use Java, you don’t have either.

What’s behind this schizophrenic attitude? Are we afraid of our government, but we’re not afraid of Google because that’s just a company and we’ll show them who’s the boss?

Is it just the different quantity of people that now have an opportunity to watch us? Everybody can connect to the Internet and take a look at your house. But it’s just a couple of thousand anonymous, faceless persons that are getting paid to watch you. But does the quantity make a difference? I doubt it.

I say this: The folks “who have nothing to hide” should just shut up. If it’s okay for you if somebody you don’t know watches every step you make via “official” surveillance cameras, then it does not make the slightest difference for you if the rest of the world can also see your home in the Internet. After all, you’ve got nothing to hide, and in theory all these people could just take a stroll down your road anyway.

Those who value privacy as an essential foundation of Freedom, however, will have serious concerns about both the surveillance cameras run by their government and Google Streetview. Both are significant intrusions into our privacy, and neither should be tolerated.

Since I’ve finished casual reading a novel on the iPhone in five days, that already says that it is possible to use the iPhone as an eBook reader. It’s a small screen, but it works quite well in the dark and since it’s a mobile phone, you always have your eBook library with you.

From the software side, there are three eBook reader applications that I’ve tried on the iPhone: Amazon’s Kindle app, Apple’s iBooks and Stanza. While iBooks has the fanciest animations (with Stanza in close pursuit), Amazon’s Kindle app has proven to be the fastest and most reliable app of the three. No crashes. Fast access to your book. Fast skimming through pages. Fast switching between books. This thing really just works.

Stanza showed a bunch of hiccups while skimming through pages and it just wasn’t a very reliable experience.

Apple’s iBooks app is beautiful to look and flipping through pages looks like flipping the pages of a real book. But the app sometimes is sort of sluggish on the iPhone 3G and that reduces the over-all experience significantly.

For purchasing new content directly from the iPhone, Apple’s iBooks app provides the better experience. Everything can be handled directly from the app and that’s sort of seductive. The Kindle app switches to Safari and directs you to the Amazon website. That’s not as straightforward, sexy and seductive as Apple’s solution. But I’m pretty sure that Amazon will change that over time.

A big plus of Amazon’s Kindle app is that it synchronizes with the WhisperSync service — all your other Kindle enabled devices “know” your last reading position and they all are able to download your latest purchases directly from the Amazon cloud. The beauty of Amazon’s offering is that they don’t care what device you are using as long as it has the free Kindle software on it. At the time of this writing, the Kindle app runs on Macs, PCs, Androids, Blackberries, iPhones, iPads and, of course, on Amazon’s own Kindle devices. Depending on your gadget fleet, this alone can be a killer argument for choosing the Kindle app over iBooks.

While I do not yet know whether I will purchase the new Kindle 3 or an iPad (or both), it already dawned on me that my book library will more and more become purely digital. I love the look and feel of physical books, but I also like the idea of always having my collection of books around. It’s a privilege of the 21st century to have that luxury, and we should take advantage of that. We should also not forget that the Amazon’s Kindle and the iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch are still in their infancy; they are what stone tables were to a printed book long before papyrus or paper were invented. They will eventually get there and then we’ll have our Harry Potter-style magical books. Just give them a couple more years.

Years later, after I finished the Gymnasium, I made the horrible mistake of making my living in the IT field. Nothing is more boring than being forced to work on something that doesn’t interest you. At all. Like a business software for video rental shops, for example. Or modules for some other business software that creates summarized invoices. Or corporate web pages. Or setting up and configuring email servers. Or, heaven help, trying to explain to a colleague from administration how to print out an email in color.

I must confess that for a short while I had my absolute dream job in the computer industry. I worked as a technical writer and support engineer on a team that developed an own programming language and development tools. As a teenager, I wrote natural language parsers for text adventure games. Now I worked on a programming language itself. Life was interesting and the job was cool. Unfortunately, the company behind it was not so cool and went down the drain in its first incarnation. I’ve lost my trust in the management, which is why I didn’t sign up for the second incarnation. And I was right – the second incarnation failed as well. Now there’s a third incarnation, fueled by only a fistful of people. I think they’re now small enough to be able to survive.

But I’m drifting.

The fact is that after this job, everything else were just shallow, tasteless experiences that have only achieved one thing: To bore me braindead.

I’ve worked in a wide range of IT roles, from support over programming to networking, systems development and technical writing. Technical writing, at least in the context of a programming language, was probably the most rewarding position because I was on a very long leash and could play a lot with the product I had to write about. Being in touch with the user community over the Internet and on conferences was also a great experience.

But over the last couple of years, all of that has gone. You know, instead of learning how to do some Internet programming with your own programming language, the daily job has now something to do with adding routes to a Cisco routing table, creating user accounts or digging into some configuration files of some open source software I don’t care about.

And when you don’t actually care, it’s just draining, boring work and no fun at all.

I’ve also grown tired of reading one phone book after another, and as a matter of fact, the daily IT life requires us poor IT folks to continuously read documentation papers the size of the phone book of New York City. Nothing becomes simpler, because nobody in the industry actually wants things to become simpler. All the developers seem to do is to add one layer of complexity on top of another. Setting up Gordano NT Mail back in the late 1990s was a breeze: This eMail server was simple and powerful and reliable. Setting up Microsoft Exchange or Postfix in the year 2010 is a nightmare of complexity. And the worst part: They don’t do more for the company where I work now than NT Mail did for the company where I worked in 1998. The 12 year old version of NT Mail beats today’s Exchange and Postfix (or EXIM or whatever) by an order of magnitude when it comes to usability, maintainability and flexibility. But that is just one example. I could give you dozens of others, but this one alone is representative enough.

And I’ve just grown tired of learning all those unnecessary crap just to get a theoretically simple job done.

Software development is another thing that has lost almost all of its former appeal. If you want to work with a “modern” language like Java or C#, you have to also learn the stuff behind dozens of other acronyms just to get going, XML and SQL being just two of the most common ones. Agile programming. Aspect-oriented programming. Bullshit-oriented programming. It’s all about the buzzwords now, not about empowering a programming. It’s no longer about efficiently getting something done. It’s about giving IT managers something to put in their Powerpoint presentations.

Even in programming, a once creative occupation, the fun is gone.

But to be honest, the fun has even left the Internet, because the Internet has dumbed down to the level of TV. Especially discussion forums are only bearable after a glass or two of good Scotch, and then only when you do not read follow-ups to your own postings anymore.

I’ve already had burnout symptoms before, and probably this lost of interest is just telling me that it’s urgent time to change my career before I’m entering the next phase. But we all know that changing one’s career is anything but an easy endeavor in the year 2010, with the economy and general perspectives what they are now. Common sense dictates to better stick with what you have because it might be hopeless to begin something else.

I don’t know. All I can say is that I wish the time back when I enjoyed going to work because I was doing something cool there and something that was challenging and at the same time fun. But I’m afraid that those jobs no longer exist (for me) in the IT field.

I love this little casual game. I first bought it for my iPhone, and when I became addicted, I also downloaded the Mac version. It’s also been ported to the PC, the iPad and Flash so that it can be played on the web. PopCap made sure that there’s no escape.

I prefer playing it on the iPhone – this tower defense game variant really benefits from the iPhone multi touch display, and I can imagine that this could be a killer app for the iPad. The screen size of the iPad is perfect for this game, and it’s so much easier to play with the tap interface instead of moving and clicking the mouse.

Now what’s it all about? Like I’ve said, it’s basically a tower defense game. Waves of different zombies are trying to reach your house in order to have a little dinner party with your brain as the main course. To defend yourself, you can place different kinds of plants in your garden and backyard, including water plants in the swimming pool. There are peashooters, man-eating plants and poisonous mushrooms just to name a few. And there are football player zombies, lawn mower zombies and many others. Even a Michael Jackson Moonwalker zombie with an accompanying zombie ballet.

This game is not an interactive Alan Wake movie, but it’s real fun and great if you only want to play for a few minutes at a time.

Give it a try.

http://www.popcap.com/games/pvz

Alan Wake is more like an interactive horror movie than it is a third person shooter. It’s got great atmosphere, a twisted multi-layered and well written and narrated story line, it pushes the graphics capabilities of the Xbox 360 beyond her limits and it offers a deeply immersive (single player) gaming experience.

You follow bestseller author Alan Wake on a vacation with his wife and muse to a lake house near the small town Bright Falls where he hopes to finally break his writer’s block that has been keeping him from writing a new book for two years already. But reality is quickly falling apart in this interactive movie, when you discover that the lake where you are spending your vacation has the power to make works of art and fiction come true and that a dark force wants to use your creative skills to set itself free.

The lake house was formerly owned by another author who appears in your nightmares and whose story is somehow interwoven with your own fate. You begin to find pages of a manuscript which appears to have been written by you, but you cannot remember ever having worked on it. But what really cracks the borders of your mental sanity is that those pages describe events that happen only after you have found them.

When your wife suddenly disappears, you have to find out whether you are a real person in charge of your life or whether you have been written by someone and are only a character in a horror story with self awareness, but without any influence on your own destiny. But whether you are a fictive character yourself or not, you have to write your own ending to the story in order to get your lover back from the darkness that took her.

An odyssey through the works of yourself and the author who visited you in your nightmares begins, with the materialized darkness in close pursuit.

Thanks to Microsoft’s intervention, Alan Wake is an Xbox 360-exclusive title and the PC version that was under development is being held back and might never hit the shelves of a store. But Xboxes are cheap, so if you don’t already own one, you should definitely get one to play this game. It’s well worth it.

UPDATE: Maybe I should mention that many of the ideas in Alan Wake remind me of John Carpenter’s In The Mouth Of Madness. It doesn’t really matter, though. Alan Wake has a life and soul of its own. But if you liked John Carpenter’s movie, chances are that you will also enjoy this game.

If you want to know why males grow long hair, study some history. In the past, long hair was a status symbol for Freedom – it separated aristocrats from peons. Although this has mostly been forgotten, it is still a motivation to let your hair grow long: For reasons unknown, everybody seems to believe nowadays that males have to wear short hair, and that in turn is reason enough to have long hair that separates you from the masses who do not even know why they cut it (except for: Everybody does it, so it has to be the right thing).

Now programmers usually do not shine with their social skills – this forum is an excellent reference and example for it. But they usually have the intellectual capacity to understand many fundamental aspects of the society they live in, and since programmers are in the business of creating and changing things, they want to demonstrate that they do not belong to the class of peons who are just doing what they’re being told by the now suit-wearing self-proclaimed aristocrats.

We do not wear suits and ties but we wear long hair because we are free thinkers who do not bend to the rules of society.

It’s something we have in common with Heavy Metal dudes and it explains why we usually also love Metal so much.

Rock hard. Ride free.