iCloud was undoubtedly what tipped me over the edge to buy an iPad. It hadn’t launched and few technical details were available, but the idea of iCloud and Apple’s reputation for eminently usable technologies had me convinced that it was going to transform mobile computing. After a couple of months this reality has not manifested itself for me, but the potential is certainly there. There are many good points, there are gaps that have no solution yet (the bad) and there are those gaps for which inelegant solutions exist (the ugly). I’m going to reflect on these from my own point of view as a researcher whose needs are for a) manipulating text documents and b) a mobile library of PDF documents. More…
This song, in so many ways, encapsulates the vibe right now. Many people call it “mango madness” but it’s nowhere near hysterical enough to be a madness. It’s more subtle than that. You don’t quite realise it but the whole rhythm of the place slows down and becomes lethargic. Which is fine if you have nothing to do. In fact, the whole place can be quite calm with a feint din of activity as a reminder that life still exists. But, if the mind and body are required to be active then it will be like trying to run through knee-deep mud. At this time of year, it’s best to do the Mango Walk…
I originally bought the iPad as a laptop replacement thinking I’d probably have to scale back my mobile access to some things I normally use a computer for. Silly me.
Mail, web browsing and games are functions that the iPad and iOS are well-known to excel in.
But, I’m most impressed by:
1. Pages and The Thesis. The only thing it’s missing is EndNote references. But this is not really important for me when I’m out and about (i.e. in the library).
2. Evernote for organised note-taking. And it synchronises with my desktop.
3. Readdle Docs for synchronised access to all my documents. My whole PhD is currently 2GB. Easy. Plus I can access my Google Docs. Mind you, this will probably be replaced with iCloud when it launches.
4. Citrix Receiver for access to work. Not that I want to encourage myself or need to work at all hours, but it helps. And given how well the Citrix app works, I’m think of replacing my work desktop with the iPad – BYO style.
5. Textastic for editing code locally or on remote servers. Am looking after a few websites at the moment and it helps to have a nice editor for any emergency coding. Textastic is it.
6. Flipboard‘s magazine layout for any type of feed is just plain sexy.
But, all of this is not really possible without Apple’s Smart Cover. Whether I want to attach one of my Apple wireless keyboards or simply have a more comfortably inclined iPad for using the on-screen keyboard, the Smart Cover can handle it.
It took me a while to get there, but am thoroughly convinced I won’t ever need a laptop.
The even more random bookmark (aka someone's business card I vaguely remember meeting)
Other things I have been known to use as bookmarks:
The receipt I used to buy the book
The library receipt for the book
Train tickets (big favourite)
Movie tickets (also quite popular)
Paper clips (not recommended)
Cleaning cloth for my glasses
Sticky notes (sounds like a good idea, but really isn’t)
Driver’s license
Postcards (usually ones that I was supposed to send)
Shopping lists (before I got an iPhone)
A coin (only once)
I’m sure there have been plenty others – generally speaking, if it’s flat (or close enough) I’ve probably used it as a bookmark. But rarely are they actual bookmarks…
After 8 days, 2000 kilometres and two pairs of shoes, Sara and I limped back into Darwin Friday night exhausted but refreshed. Our hastily put together plan to go camping through the Victoria River District and East Kimberley had more or less come off. The idea was to camp in Keep River National Park on the way, then head to El Questro Wilderness Park for a couple of days before sussing out other places to go in East Kimberley. Then on the way back we would try to find somewhere accessible in Gregory National Park. The trip, in the end, bore only a feint resemblance to this plan, but it mattered little – we had hit the Never Never.
There’s no doubting I’m a city slicker – an urbanite par excellence. But there’s something special about surrendering yourself to the rhythms of nature. On the few occasions I go out camping it never ceases to amaze me just how natural it feels and, by contrast, how contrived my normally urban life seems: there’s no need for chronological time let alone alarm clocks; I eat when I’m hungry but it seems to always occur at proper meal times; I’ve got lots of energy despite having to labour more to get anything done; I have no need for my reading glasses because I’m seldom looking at anything in close range. This surprises me because I know so little about camping or nature (beyond the basics of what dangers it presents), but it doesn’t take very long to start to feel at ease and to have a certain competence in the outback. I doubt the same basic competence could be achieved with such ease if one were ignorant of urban life and had to navigate the city landscape – I find myself, three days later, still adjusting to being back in Darwin and wishing I were back in East Kimberley.
But, there was also something perturbing that seemed to lay submerged just below the surface of the wild beauty of East Kimberely. It wasn’t until I visited Lake Argyle that it occurred to me. In 1965 as the debate was raging over the development of Northern Australia (especially in East Kimberley), Bruce Davidson, an agricultural economist, produced a clinical economic critique of trying to develop the north through irrigation and farming. He titled this book The Northern Myth. Interest in the book was revived especially around the 2006-7 plans for water reforms and the establishment of the Northern Australia Land and Water Taskforce. It came amid responses to the drought crisis of the noughties that produced similar debates to those Davidson rallied against in the 1960s and 70s about developing irrigation and farming in the north. During this time the potency of the book seemed to lie not in its economic arguments but more in the way that it exposed the purely ideological motivations driving the push for developing Northern Australia. This prompted various people to take up the analysis of what Davidson exposed and so the concept of the Northern Myth has expanded with it beyond the merely economic to also capture the way the Northern Australian frontier has been romanticised. The natural beauty and abundance of East Kimberely is certainly awe inspiring, as I as fortunate enough to experience first hand. But after I share some of the photos of the trip that hopefully captures a glimpse of this I want to revisit quickly the sense of sadness the Northern Myth elicits. More…
A ‘weak Sydney constitution’, efficacious Top End viruses and a pressing deadline have soaked up most of my mental energy recently. Even more recently I’ve been dragging myself through the lofty heights of the Darwin rental market and have been feeling a little vertiginous. Here’s a quick post about what is likely to be coming up as I come back to Earth…
The 4th anniversary of the NTER is coming up. Because of unrelated landrights issues that have been going on recently I have felt like revisiting the self-determination critique of the NTER. I’m taking Francesca Merlan’s interesting and controversial 2009 piece for Inside Story – More than rights – as my point of departure. It kicked up a lively debate that I wish to recount because it does highlight the internal tension of self-determination – land rights alone do not guarantee respect, but neither does an intervention. My own perspective on this debate is that respect is the wrong measuring stick for the moral grammar of Indigenous politics and I provide some reflections of what the concept of dignity might offer.
As an aspiring academic (depending on which day you catch me) and former IT nerd, I was very interested in the discussions over at Club Troppo on the lack of technological advances in teaching, especially at universities. Nicholas Gruen started the ball rolling with a vignette of his ideas about the problem and possible solutions. This was followed by Ken Parish’s insights as a university teacher who has negotiated the tricky path of adopting new technology to provide more innovative and effective models of teaching. I had started had only just started to discuss my concerns with the diagnoses and responses of both Nicholas and Ken before I was hit by the aforementioned afflictions. I’ve been putting a few ideas together as a fuller critique and response to their useful contributions – I’m more sympathetic to their positions after speaking to them, but I still think that there are shortcomings with their diagnoses of the problems with tertiary education and the potential role that technology can play to redress them whilst elevating the quality of teaching and learning.
But, I can never rest for too long with my feet on the ground. These practical debates don’t offer the thrill of intellectual flights of fancy. And my chosen intellectual flying machine? This critique by George Ritzer of Siva Vaidhyanathan’s The Googlization of Everything (And Why We Should Worry). Ritzer and Vaidhyanathan seem intent on resurrecting the futile and poisonous Theory Wars of the 1990s. Whilst Ritzer makes the error of equating theory with reality (the web is postmodern, therefore it needs a postmodern theory), Vaidhyanathan appears to be far too dismissive of important critiques. I haven’t read Vaidhyanathan’s book so I can’t engage in any depth with the substance of the debate, but it’s fun to comment on how academic egos operate.
Also, I’ve fallen in love (for the umpteenth time) with Grant Green so I’ll probably be sharing some of my favourite Grant Green tunes.
To be more accurate and fair my gripes are mostly with my HTC Desire and the HTC Sense version of Android. This post has been prompted by the way my phone seemed to freeze up for no apparent reason whilst I was out shopping yesterday – the only active thing happening on my phone was the music player. But, it’s not like this unfortunate event has provided me with an excuse to complain, but it has brought into sharp focus the fact that I have a number of complaints. I’m not sure if these grievances are serious yet, especially when I weight them up against the things my HTC Desire and Android do well. I’d always told myself I’d give the phone at least one year. But in order to really do that without routinely feeling frustrated and exasperated, I’m going to have to find ways to deal with these issues (in no particular order):
There are also a number of features that compare poorly to the iPhone – comparisons that are inevitable given how much I enjoyed the iPhone.
But, in the end, my HTC Desire and Android performs really comparable well to the iPhone on a number of fronts. And there are some unique features which are starting to appeal to me as ‘must have’. Sure, Android has taken me some effort to get used to, but it’s been worth it. See my detailed overview of problems, workarounds and highlights over the fold… More…
I once read a silly fairy tale, called the Three Princes of Serendip: as their Highnesses travelled, they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of…
My afternoon has had a bright tinge to it since going to the CDU Library at lunch. I went there to pick up a specific book that I had very quickly found through the online catalogue. I drove to CDU, went to the library, found the floor where my book was located and then proceeded to find the aisle where it should be awaiting me. But as I’m scanning each aisle I pause, as is my mostly unthinking habit, and have a look at some titles – anthropology, psych, wait…what’s that? Staring back at me was a curious book with a rather unimaginative, but informative title: Men and Friendship. The concept of friendship occupied my interest for a while and so I flicked through and found a pleasant surprise: a qualitative psychological study of friendship between men from the early 1980s. Arguably this is a time when the organisation of social relationships around gender and sexuality were profoundly changing. And this book seems to track some of these changes through male friendship. Here’s the first paragraph from the Preface:
Table of Contents for Miller (1983) Men & Friendship
Most men, particularly if they think about it, if they let themselves feel their personal truth about it, will admit they are disappointed in the friendships with other men. Men may have wives, they may even have women friends, but their relationships with other men, which could be a true echo of their own manhood, are generally characterized by thinness, insincerity, and even chronic wariness. Since most men don’t let themselves think or feel about friendship, this immense collective and personal disappointment is usually concealed, sloughed over, shrugged away.
Put simply, this book appears to contain some insights into the formative years of the transformation of male friendship by modern ideas of intimacy.
Anyway, my excitement about the book has certainly been exaggerated by the recent absence of this kind of serendipity. I often walk into the library at CDU without holding high expectations of what I might find. CDU is mostly a vocational and teaching university, so there is not a great deal of breadth and depth in many areas of the arts and humanities. Even though the collection itself might not be large, wide or deep, it’s there for all to see and browse. This, however, got me thinking about the new library at my own university.
I’ve retired the old site and all its content. Of course, it’s still available at its old home. This new site is a work in progress – today I created a child theme based on plaintxtblog and simply modified the colour scheme. I will work on the layout next time I’m bored or suffering from my regular fits of insomnia. But I wanted it up today because I have been thinking of changing my blog for sometime now. There’ll be more but less with regularity – mesoblogging, if you will. No more long rants. Not that I’ll stop exploring at length various issues, topics and events. Instead, I will turn long rants into a series of shorter, linked rants. Also, the blog will be home to many reflections that don’t quite fit into 140 characters – brief sketches of ideas, questions or related links. I’d like to think I’m getting the balance right now that I have reached the hump year of my third decade.
And, in honour of this auspicious occasion, it’s worth pointing out a few historical events that accompanied my entry into the world:
The matter of Karen Ann Quinlan was decided in favour of her right to die on the very same day that I was born. It was a landmark case that helped to publicise the issue in the United States.
The day after I was born, Apple Computers also came to life.
The year of my birth also marked the 200th anniversary of the birth of the United States.
It’s useful to put your own day into historical perspective, not as a way of celebrating the year of my birth, but just to grasp the enormity and complexity of the world I was born into and have since shared with others. And most of all, as with every birthday, it’s time for me to say thanks to my mum for everything she’s done. Good work Shouk!
iCloud was undoubtedly what tipped me over the edge to buy an iPad. It hadn’t launched and few technical details were available, but the idea of iCloud and Apple’s reputation for eminently usable technologies had me convinced that it was going to transform mobile computing. After a couple of months this reality has not manifested itself for me, but the potential is certainly there. There are many good points, there are gaps that have no solution yet (the bad) and there are those gaps for which inelegant solutions exist (the ugly). I’m going to reflect on these from my own point of view as a researcher whose needs are for a) manipulating text documents and b) a mobile library of PDF documents. More…
To be more accurate and fair my gripes are mostly with my HTC Desire and the HTC Sense version of Android. This post has been prompted by the way my phone seemed to freeze up for no apparent reason whilst I was out shopping yesterday – the only active thing happening on my phone was the music player. But, it’s not like this unfortunate event has provided me with an excuse to complain, but it has brought into sharp focus the fact that I have a number of complaints. I’m not sure if these grievances are serious yet, especially when I weight them up against the things my HTC Desire and Android do well. I’d always told myself I’d give the phone at least one year. But in order to really do that without routinely feeling frustrated and exasperated, I’m going to have to find ways to deal with these issues (in no particular order):
