The future of the Novel. I had an interesting discussion about the future of the Novel. This was the result of a discussion regarding my recent blog post on what books were on my Kindle. My friend asked me if I thought books would continue given the short attention spans of young people these days and their need to multi task. At first, I said yes. Because most forms of media have lasted even though new forms have come along. But then I realized that was saying that books would continue albeit in electric form but like TV’s effect on radio, the type of content would change. For those of my generation and maybe even the generation of my children (now entering mid life), we enjoy giving up control of our minds and emotions to a write or a director of a movie. But this pretty much only possible in a linear medium. Novels take a lot of work to read because they ask for us to pay attention and to use our imagination to bring to life in our minds what the words on the page our saying. Maybe a generation that has grown up with the Internet will not learn the disciple to read through a 300 page novel. I pass no value judgment in this.
Archive for April, 2010
The future of the Novel in the electronic age
April 28, 2010Adobe deserves to die
April 28, 2010
My wife, is an amazing graphic designer who was prematurely forced into early retirement by me. But she is still designing stuff (she has her own project which is not the subject of this blog). She has been using CS3 for the last few years. It cost her $1,600. When the latest version of the Mac O/S came out, Snow Leopard, Adobe said that CS3 would not run under it. But then a number of people tested and said that it did run. Deborah upgraded to Snow Leopard and everything worked. Today, Adobe sent out a software upgrade to make sure that CS3 would not longer work under Snow Leopard. Of course, she did not know that is what the automatic upgrade was designed to do. So then when she started up CS3 she got a message that there was a problem with her license for CS3 and she should call support or uninstall and reinstall her CS3 package. She called support and was on the phone with someone for an hour who could not help her. She then uninstalled and reinstalled her software from Adobe. Still did not work. She then talked (and I talked) with a very arrogant person in their sales dept. He said CS3 would not work with Snow Leopard. That she would have to upgrade to CS4 or CS5. CS5 is not available until Friday and they took down the trial copy that you could download from their site. The sales person from Adobe said that if she bought CS4 now she could update for free to CS5 when it is release after this Friday. It then took an other hour and a walk through with a sales rep to find the way to buy CS4 and download it (all the other ways would involve shipping and additional days of work lost). My wife has a friend who is also a designer who was put out of work today by Adobe as well. Any company that treats their customers so badly deserves to die and die a painful death. They could have easily sent all their CS3 customers an email weeks ago telling them what was going to happen and what their options were instead of wasting their time in this way.
She is now trying to download 5 gigs of software from Adobe. Had she known all this in advance she could have order the product.
PS I also think Flash sucks!
What is on my Kindle
April 13, 2010A very close friend who was a very successful publisher and is now a very successful writer was surprised to learn that I still read books. She found this out when I was blogging about the iPad and comparing it to the Kindle. She asked that I post the titles of the books that I have been reading. I decided to post the contents of my kindle. These are the books I have ordered over the last two years. I have read most but not all.
I have always loved reading. As a child I read constantly. Thankfully because I never really went to school and had to educate myself. My big breakthrough came in the third grade. I was so weired that the other kids would beat me up all the time. I especially made myself popular by refusing to say the Pledge of Allegiance because it had the word “god” in it and I considered myself an atheist at the time. So these wonderful teacher (I wish I cold remember her name) arranged for me to spend all the recess time including lunch in the library. She started me off with H.G. Wells’ Outline of the History of the World. Books stayed my close friend until I was in my mid twenties. There was a time that I would certainly read 3-5 books a week. Now I mostly read when I travel which still means I get a lot of book time. But yes, there is mighty competition from podcasts, magazines, and the Internet. Still I can’t see giving up books. Although I think that especially non fiction will be impacted by new technology. However, novels will still be linear just like movies. It is wonderful to turn yourself over to someone else and let them take control of you.
So here is the list.
Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime
by Mark Halperin
My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands
by Chelsea Handler
The Time Paradox: The New Psychology of Time That Will Change Your Life
by Philip Zimbardo, John Boyd
The Zohar: Annotations to the Ashlag Commentary
by Rav Michael Laitman
Quantum Enigma: Physics Encounters Consciousness
by Fred Kuttner
The Einstein Theory of Relativity
by H.A. Lorentz
Lonely Planet Brazil (Country Guide)
by Gary Chandler
The Golden Age of Jewish Achievement: The Compendium of a Culture, a People, and Their Stunning Performance
by Steven L. Pease
Total Heart Rate Training: Customize and Maximize Your Workout Using a Heart Rate Monitor
Joe Friel
Mac OS X Snow Leopard: The Missing Manual
David Pogue
Eating Animals
Jonathan Safran Foer
Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution
Michael J. Behe
Icons of Evolution: Science or Myth?
Jonathan Wells
The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution
Richard Dawkins
The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Social Security and Medicare,
MBA, Lita Epstein
The Buzz about Bees: Biology of a Superorganism
Jürgen Tautz, Helga R. Heilmann, David C. Sandeman
Cheap
Ellen Ruppel Shell
The Life of the Bee
Maurice Maeterlinck
People of the Book
Geraldine Brooks
Beekeeping For Dummies
Howland Blackiston
The Art of Making Money
Jason Kersten
The Joy of Living: Unlocking the Secret and Science of Happiness
Eric Swanson, Yongey Rinpoche Mingyur
iWork 09 For Dummies
Jesse Feiler
Getting Things Done
DAVID ALLEN
iPhoto ’09 For Dummies
Angelo Micheletti
Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven
Susan Jane Gilman
Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy
The Soloist
Steve Lopez
The Last Tycoons: The Secret History of Lazard Frères & Co.
William D. Cohan
Man in the Dark: A Novel
Paul Auster
When You Are Engulfed in Flames
David Sedaris
Wired for War
W. SINGER
Musicophilia
Oliver Sacks
Mysteries of the Qabalah
Elias Gewurz
The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics
Leonard Susskind
The Stuff of Thought
Steven Pinker
The Geography of Bliss: One Grump’s Search for the Happiest Places in the World
Eric Weiner
Grown Up Digital : How the Net Generation is Changing YOUR World HC
Don Tapscott
Outliers: The Story of Success
Malcolm Gladwell
The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, The Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next
Lee Smolin
iPhone Portable Genius
David Pabian
Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution–and How It Can Ren
Thomas L. Friedman
Learning to Breathe
Alison Wright
Abraham’s Children: Race, Identity, and the DNA of the Chosen People
Jon Entine
Bonesetter’s Daughter, The
AMY TAN
I Am Charlotte Simmons: A Novel
Tom Wolfe
Water for Elephants: A Novel
Sara Gruen
The Brain That Changes Itself
Norman Doidge
In Defense of Food
Michael Pollan
Final Theory: A Novel
Mark Alpert
Lost, The
Daniel, Mendelsohn
The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich
Timothy Ferriss
The Omnivore’s Dilemma
Michael Pollan
Einstein: His Life and Universe
Walter Isaacson
It is not the PSA test that is a problem but what one does with the results
April 7, 2010Please forgive me for writing about this again. There has a been a lot of discussion recently about the effectives and wiseness of giving men PSA tests. I often say that I had PSA disease. From the time I was 50 (15 years ago), I had been getting regular PSA test as was the recommendation at the time. It was the view then that at PSA of under 4 was good but PSA’s above 4 were of potential concern. This was a pretty simple minded way to look at things. There are many factors that influence PSA such as weight, infections and just ones nature. My PSA was 4.1. My doctor suggested we wait a year and see what happen. We did it again a year later and my PSA was 4.3. She then suggested I have a biopsy. So I went to a urologist. He said to me there was a 25% chance that they would find cancer. I was pretty sensitive to the issue of Prostate Cancer since Andy Grove with whom I had a lot of contact at Intel had been treated a year earlier for Prostate Cancer and wrote an cover article in Fortune that got a lot of attention. With one chance in four that I would have cancer , it seemed smart to find out. I had the biopsy (not a lot of fun) and waited for the results. The doctor scheduled the appointment for the end of a day. I did not think much about that at the time but later realized that was so he could spend some more time with me when he told me that I had indeed had Prostate Cancer and had a Gleason score of 6 (3+3). I won’t go into what the Gleason score is. You can read about it here. My score was not very high. That combined with my rather low PSA score of 4.3 meant that I had about an 80% chance that my cancer was confined to my prostate and had not spread. So like most urologist at the time, he recommend that I have my prosate removed. The idea was that if the cancer had not escaped from the prostate and you removed the prostate that you could not die of prostate cancer. I think the same logic is applied to breast cancer and ovaries (in women with high risk). Of course, I might have some side effect like not being able to have an erection (I was a single man or 51 years), urinary or even worse elimination problems. There were alternatives and I choose the same method as Andy Grove. I had a combination of internal (seed) and external beam radiation. The side effects are better in general and definitely in my case. What we now know (and maybe we knew then) was that most men who have Prostate Cancer do not die of it. They die with it. We also believe that there are many kinds of Prostate Cancer and the most are not life threatening. What should have been done in my case. We should have just do what is called watch and wait. We should have checked the PSA every year or even every six months to monitor the rate of increase. We might have done a biopsy ever year or two. I think there is a good chance that now at the age of 65, I would still have had my prostate. PSA tests are cheap. I understand that they only cost about nine dollars to perform (of course the labs charge more for them). It is important to monitor the PSA. If you have a PSA of lets say 10 and a Gleason score of 8 or more, you need to do something. But Urologist make a lot of money by taking out Prostates and they will play to the uncertain. I often have contact with men that have recently been diagnosed with Prostate Cancer. In cases similar to mine I suggest that they wait. Sadly none have.
iPad and the Titanic
April 6, 2010I love my iPad. And like all friend John Doer, I do think it is the next big thing. But I am very conflicted. I feel that those of us that are creating technology are maybe the band member on the RMS Titanic. I try to be objective as much as I can about the world and think that we are all in for a very difficult time (especially our children).
- We have an economy built on the assumption of cheap energy . That is the first iceberg. Energy prices may go up ten times or more in the next ten twenty years and we are wasting valuable time.
- There will probably be major climate shifts that will cause massive destabilization of countries through out the world
- Countries like Iran will go nuclear and some nut will actually use a bomb cause not only the deaths of tens of thousands of people but the potential collapses of the worlds economy
- If that does not get us, biological terrorism may
Sorry about this. I just had to say something. Now I can go back to enjoying my iPad. Let the band play on.
iPad Day One
April 4, 2010
I have spent about 24 hours with my iPad (well not really….I did not take it to bed). I have found it to be a profound experience for me personally. For those of you the regularly read my blog (all two of you), you know that I have been working closely with computers since 1966. My first computer, a PDP-7 had less memory the the photos I take with my camera. The first computer I designed (the ill fated Profession 350 from Digital Equipment Corp), had the first winchester hard drive in a personal computer. It was 5mega bytes. Now I am hold in my hand a iPad with 64 gigs of flash memory.
It too me about two minutes to get my iPad at the Apple store. I had a reservation. There was a long line of people that did not make a reservation.
Lots of my friends are asking me about my experience with the iPad. It is hard to express because the most profound part of the iPad is really what one experiences in the interaction. I have to use the word intimate to describe it. While I think the iPad is a work in progress, one can really see/feel the potential of this kind of device. For sometime I have felt the iPad would become the black-hole of media and all media would be sucked into it. We will watch movies and TV shows , read books, play games and listen to music on it. But as far as I can see most applications that we use to get information from web searching to maps will be a better experience on the iPad than on a normal computer. This will certainly be true for shopping. And I think the iPad will bring back the opportunity for brand advertising. It will be very interesting to see what place in my life the iPad will take. I know it will between my Mac-book Pro and my iPhone but how much it will take from both is still not clear.
But the iPad in this current generation can not replace my desktop or notebook computer. It will not be able to do that until it really supports multi tasking. For instance, when I am reading a email on the iPad (love the mail program) which has a link and I click on that link I find myself in the browser and the mail program is closed down. I have to push the home button to get back to the main page and the select the mail program. I also got a blue tooth keyboard. I set it up in less than two minutes. It works wonderfully but since there is no mouse I have to reach over to the iPad’s screen and touch what I would normally click on with the mouse.
I managed to use logmein on the iPad so that I could actually run all my desktop mac software remotely. This is important if I am to go on a trip without my mac notebook. I have some programs like Quicken that are not on the iPad but which I really need. This worked pretty well although I did not like the iPad client very much.
I like so many other’s wish there was a front facing camera so I could use the iPad when I do skype with video. Skype with voice worked fine. Syncing with iTunes turned out to be a pain (I am really getting to hate iTunes), For some reason applications that I had removed from the iPad when I first sync up kept coming back. The transfer rate between my Macbook pro and the iPad seemed very slow. Transferring photos took a lot longer on the iPad than the iPhone but I suspect that is because the iPad takes higher resolution versions of the photos. It took me a while to figure out how to move TV shows and movies. The iPad uses the same format as the Apple TV which is not what your iPhone or iPod uses or what your desktop or notebook uses. You have to get iTunes convert the video to the right format (or you can use programs like Handbreak or VideoDrive2).
I have purchased Pages and Numbers but have not tried them yet. I was delighted to see that I can read my kindle books with no problem. I will probably continue to by books on the kindle at least for a while.
I wish I had the patience to by the 3G model especially since it is the only model that has true GPS. But I could not wait and I also think my usage will be primarily in places where Wifi is available. I can also use a MiFi.
It was impressive that all my iPhone apps seem to work. I was glad that I could use my Sling box application. Now the iPad is my portable TV.
