iPad 2

Weight: With its case the iPad weighs 1.5ish pounds. I am youngish if not youthful and do modest lifting but mostly the weight doesn't bother me. A bit when I was reading a novel on it while walking around the DC area for a good chunk of a day. A big hardcover fantasy can weigh more than an iPad. So it is true that the dedicated eReaders weigh more like a modest paperback while the iPad is compared to an epic fantasy in hardcover, but the weight issue can be put into perspective.

Typing: I have survived typing on an iPod Touch, this keyboard is bigger! My biggest problem is that my finger will hit a bottom letter key instead of the space bar resultingminmsomethingblikenthis. And the autocorrect doesn't do a good job of recognizing run-on words that result from this unfortunate habit of mine. Maybe with time I will train myself to hit the space bar. Less often I hit the space bar instead of an m or n. I did also mate the Bluetooth keyboard that came with the new home Mac to the iPad, which wad done quickly and painlessly so I have that option. Perfect, no. Major issue, no.

Brightness: Inverse problem of eReaders. Great in the dark, not so much in bright. But I have read large chunks during the day, so pmetimes using te case to shade the screen a little bit and just lime I might increase font size on my Kindle in twilight to extend how ,ong I can read with it I can raise the font size in daylight on the iPad. Amazon is right to make a selling point that the Kindle really does thrive in sunlight but again this is something we can work with.

me and my iPad

I got meself an iPad three weeks ago this evening.

I am quite happy with it so far.

First and most important for me is its utility as a tool for reading, and it's quite winning for that. With reading, as with many other things, one of the things I like about the iPad is that it gives you a lot of different ways to do something. So for reading, option #1 might be to just open up an e-mail with a manucript and read the manuscript within Mail. Option #2 might be to open the file in Pages, Apple's word processing app for the iPad. Option #3 might be to put the manuscript on using shared wireless network with Stanza, which is what I'd been using on my iPod Touch, and which is owned by Amazon. Option #4 might be Apple's own iBook store. And then you've got the Kindle app for the iPad and the Nook app and the Borders app. Or you've got other word proccessing apps like Documents 2 Go. I've read one novel and reviewed a contract which I had opened in Pages, and I've read another long novel in Stanza. Both are fully customizable reading environments that allow me flexibility on my font, my font size, and other important elements of the reading experience. I like the page-turning on Stanza because it's actual page-turning and now scrolling down in the document. I like that Pages can import a file direct from my e-mail while Stanza requires multiple intermediate steps on a computer sharing the same wireless network. Pages offers better support for the iPad OS cut-and-paste. In both instances, it takes only a few seconds to go from the program I'm reading in to the native Notes program on the iPad to take notes for a client. Those seconds can add up if I'm taking a lot of notes, but once upon a time I'd have to put down a manuscript, grab my note sheet, grab my pen, it's not like that was instantaneous either. And there's still the ability to then e-mail the notes directly from within the note right to the client who's supposed to be getting. Which I could do with the Touch, not with any eReader. It's safe to say that manuscript reading is hands-down better on the iPad than anything else I've ever used, including paper manuscripts, though it's not so much better as to be a complete game-changer over some of the eReaders and the like.

Haven't used the iBook store for an actual purchased book. The interface for the store has rightly been faulted for lacking a lot of the browsing tools that Amazon has. You either find something that's being marketed to you via the bestseller lists or something, or you'll buy exactly what you went to the store wanting to buy. You won't encounter a lot via serendipity. But looking at some sample chapters of Mistborn or the Winnie the Pooh that came with, the reading experience when you do get a book is about as good as you can ask for. I haven't sampled all of the different device-related apps, but I can't see much for them to improve upon other than for allowing you to access your device-specific books on this device.

Second, newspapers. I've been desperate for a second read to the NY Times since the other local papers, Newsday especially, went ever further south in the mid-00s. When I had the Kindle, I liked the idea of having a wireless subscription to the Washington Post, but the miserableness of the reading experience was one of the factors that ultimately allowed me to give up the Kindle without much angst. Then I went to reading it on the web site and buying hard copy when I was in Manhattan. More recently the Post introduced an iPhone app that offered an abridged selection of full articles (like, all the op ed pieces but none of the editorials) in a buggy but attractive and intuitive manner. Now, with the iPad, I'm able to take full advantage of a replica subscription powered by NewspaperDirect. This costs me $100 per year after a seven-day trial and is also available on monthly and quarterly subscriptions, and it is wonderful. I'm given a reduced image replica page of the actual newspaper to look at. I can click on that page and read it blown-up with all the ability to pan and scan and pinch and un-pinch with my fingers. Below the reduced image there's a list of articles on that page, so I can click a particular article if I don't want to peruse the entire page. There's also an ability to click the article in the replica page. I can scroll through the pages. I can scroll through the articles. I can click to a table of contents. I can click to a 30-day archive. I can click to share. As with reading manuscripts, the iPad is offering me the best way to consume content that I've ever had -- or maybe for newspapers tied with the best because I do still find reading actual newspapers to be pleasant.

There are a few faults with the replica subscription. If you blow up the page, you have to go back to the page with the reduced image to hit the button to go to the next page. It would save a lot of time if I could go from page to page within the full page image. If you read an article in the sports section that was given a shout-out on the front page, the article is "married" to the front page image, and you then have to to back to go forward because when you click that article you're taken back to the front. Same thing if there's an article that's given a shout-out on the front page of a section. Yes, you get used to this, but it takes some getting used to and some attention to not think you're going from page C1 to C2 and find that you've actually gone from A1 to A2. And because the touch screen isn't perfectly responsive, you'll blow up to the full replica page, try and scroll down or across, and find out your movement has registered as a tap instead of a scroll. Which then brings you back to the reduced page image, and then you have to tap back. That is a minor annoyance and time sink. On the other hand, have you even been outdoors reading a newspaper on a windy day and you try to turn the pages? Wrangle the pages, more like. While there are negatives to this experience, in its entirety it's as close to holding a dead tree as I've ever gotten.

And of course, I can also go the Post website on my iPad, or to the mobile version of the Post website, or use the Post app, though it hasn't been updated for the iPad and is thus one of those that you can fuzzily expand to a larger version of the iPhone version. As with reading books, I can use the iPad to read my newspaper in a number of different ways.

When people belittle the iPad for being a bigger version of the iPhone, they totally don't get it. Yes, all of the core built-in system features like Mail, Safari, the Address Book, looking at photos, using Google Maps,II' all of these are now bigger. But it's a lot more than just that they're bigger. Its vastly easier to check e-mail on the iPad screen than on the iPhone/Touch screen. You can look at actual web sites on the iPad instead of the mobile versions of same. You can do nifty things for looking at photos like the "origami" slideshow that just wouldn't work on the smaller screen. Pretty much anything I want to do on the iPad in terms of those core functions, I can do not just in bigger ways but in a myriad of better ways. In some instances, though, bigger isn't better. Good photos look sweet on the iPad, bad photos look worse, so I'll have to maintain separate photo albums in some instances to sync with different devices.

I've used the iPad for entirely trivial things. Numbers is a powerful spreadsheet app, I used it to make scorepads for Scrabble and for Hearts, now if we play a heated family game of Hearts, it can be e-mailed to the rest of the family just like that and clutter their inboxes.

There are so many things that I can do with the iPad that I kind of feel like it's a sports car being driven around Manhattan on rush hour. Until I really app it up...

As I get more and more of these gadgets, certain things I've been doing one way I now need to start doing another. This morning I spent some time tidying up my Address Book, and now I need to add to it substantially. It used to be that it was just as quick to have client contact info in a word-processing file which could be searched just as quickly as any file, now I need to really start using things like the Address Book/Contacts.

As Apple is in the habit of doing, the iPad doesn't work with OS 10.4. It's actually more compatible with older versions of Windows machines than it is with Apple machines. I've gotten a new Mac for my apartment, but until I get a new Mac for my office or upgrade its OS, there are some things that I have to sync with the iPod Touch and then sync at home to sync with the iPad.

The battery life of the iPad is excellent, but unfortunately the recharge time is slow slow slow. It can take an hour, maybe a little more than that, for me to recharge my iPod Touch in an outlet, it can take me three or hour hours to recharge the iPad.

Would I recommend the iPad? In an instant.

security!

You know how much I love our airport security regime, so here's a nice article sent my way courtesy of a tweet from Elizabeth Moon

http://www.salon.com/technology/ask_the_pilot/2010/08/06/airport_security/index.html

And of course it isn't just at the airport. Still have fond memories of the Washington Nationals, who let you bring in a factory-sealed water bottle but not the same bottle empty. For all the TSA lunacy, at least they let me bring an empty bottle in to fill up at water fountain and take on to plane.

Why do we put up with this, people? Why do we put up with it??

Restrepo

Restrepo is a documentary about a US Army base in Afghanistan's Korengal Valley. It is the effort of noted writer Sebastian Junger, whose book The Perfect Storm was the source material for George Clooney movie of same name, and British photographer and documentarian Tin Hetherington. The two embedded with the 2nd platoon of the Army's 173rd Airborne, who are assigned to the Korengal in Summer 2007. Taking daily fire from Taliban forces, the commander decides to essentially leapfrog his opponents by building a smaller outpost that can put Army eyes on some of the attack routes. That outpost is named Restrepo, after one of the soldiers killed by the Taliban, and that in turn the name of the movie.

Cinematically, the film is certainly to be recommended. The filmmakers were embedded for an extended period. When the bullets were flying, when the firefights were raging, when the unit was out on a dangerous patrol in areas ceded to the Taliban, the filmmakers were there. So they earned the right to film up close and personal, and we are there. In that regard the film is a lot like the often powerful work of documentarian Frederic Wiseman, whose Titticut Follies or Basic Training are pioneeering works of cinema. One major difference: after their tour the soldiers in the unit were interviewed in Italy on their way back home. This adds perspective, but at the cost of adding an element straight out of modern reality TV to the formal verite lines of the film.

Alas, there's one thing that seriously detracts from the film's claims to the cinema verite label. We are embedded with a unit that is fighting and dying, and we see no blood. Soldier dies, the film pans delicately to his boot. I can blame the filmmakers a little for this, but not a lot. Their film reflects an American mores in which blood in war is supposed to hide out only in fiction. If the NY Times or Washington Post puts too graphic a picture on its front page there are howls of outrage at the idea that innocent children might be exposed. Sticky wicket here because you are embedded and close to the men and arguably should have some respect for their privacy, but when the bloodlessness calls attention to itself that's a mistake too. There's a lot of build-up in the movie for Operation Rock Avalanche, when the Army forces decide to build on their success erecting Restrepo by going on actual patrol in a part of the terrain that the Army hasn't given the boots-on-ground treatment to, which is certain to and does result in combat with the Taliban who are happy to wage war on their own turf. But almost all the bad stuff that happens in Rock Avalanche, we get described by the soldiers during their well after-the-fact interviews in Italy. Even though the embedded journalists are out on patrol, with their cameras, almost certainly taking footage that could better depict what's happening -- and maybe even without being the most graphic parts of that footage.

Because of its verite elements this is very really what it's like to be a GI in the middle of nowhere on Afghanistan. The isolation, the band of brothers, the day-to-day, the professionalism, the challenge of winning hearts ands minds of the people you're fighting. There's a lot to learn by sitting and watching.

One on level, the movie's a kind of success story. Army lives are lost, but Restrepo does succeed in blocking the Taliban paths to the main outpost, considerably reducing the level of attacks.

But there's also a pointlessness to the whole affair, on two levels.

First, we can learn a lot and still learn nothing, by which I mean that you're unlikely to leave Restropo thinking any differently about the war than you did before the coming attractions. It's grunt's eye POV makes it very easy to take from the movie whatever lessons you most feel like takng.

Which to me is the second poiintlessness. We as a country cannot afford to fight them over there so they don't attack us here when the over there means the Korengal Valley, backwards people clinging to a bare sustenance existence in ramshackle houses clinging to the sides of a mountain in the middle of nowhere. If we can't take the best shot these people have to offer and bounce back from whatever blow that might be, then Western civilization is as hollow and doomed as the Soviet Union in 1985. This isn't to say that these people can't do us harm; I woke up on September 11, 2001 planning to visit the Borders at the World Trade Center after work. I was in London a month after the 7/7 subway bombings. I know what can happen. But we cannot win that battle posting troops on the Korengal.

And in fact the Korengal was abandoned by the US Army subsequent to the events seen here. 50 soldiers lost their lives in the Valley. That doesn't account for the opportunity cost of what else we could have done with the resources we poured into the Korengal.

How much would it cost to have a propaganda machine that tries to point out all the Muslim-on-Muslim suicide bombings that take place on a weekly if not daily basis vs how much we spent in the Korengal? If we don't have the ability to wage a war like that, we can pour all the resources we want into Afghanistan, Somalia, Kenya, Iran, Iraq, Yemen, anywhere, and we aren't going to accomplish anything except bankrupting ourselves well before exposing the bankrupt ideology of our opponents. We probably should invest in schools in Afghanistan because literate people are more likely to make good Afghan policeman and less likely to buy what the Taliban are selling. But we can also invest in things like high-speed rail in the US, streets in NYC that aren't riddled with potholes and pavement seams, a National Mall in DC that doesn't look like the dust bowl. Only, we can't do that so well when we're pouring money into the Korengal.

In any event, this is a film worth seeing, very well worth seeing. We've seen a lot of documentaries or realistic enough fiction films about the Baghdad or Iraqi desert side of our wars on terror in Afghanistan and Iraq, but the POV we get in Restrepo we've seen hardly at all. This would be an excellent way of broadening perspective even were it not just about the only way of doing it.

blatant linkage

My client Tim Akers took some time away from his work on Dead of Veridon to give us his thoughts on the Nook he got for Christmas. Click here and enjoy. And then you should enjoy Akers' debut novel The Heart of Veridon, which Library Journal has rightly hailed as a key title in the modern steampunk movement, and then reserve his forthcoming The Horns of Ruin. We've heard of sword and sorcery, or s&s, and now we add the third s of steampunk to create a fully-realized s&s&s fantasy which people are giong to be talking about come November.

He mentions an article in the NY Times today by Randall Stross, an author on hi tech topics. I, like Stross, don't see the dedicated ebook reader as a lasting technology, that being said a lot of people are betting a lot of money that Randall and I are wrong. And Randall gives a lot of attention in his article to Amazon's notorious tendency to say lots without saying anything. The only problem here is that Amazon has actually sold a shitload of Kindles and I do see them all over the place. So Amazon might be coy on giving hard sales #s as a matter of policy or of habit, the iPad may be selling on a much quicker pace than the Kindle when it launched at the end of 2007, but they've still sold a lot of these suckers, they've sold a ton of books for people to read on these suckers, and Randall and I might be entirely correct that this isn't what people will be reading on in 20 years but certainly near term the Kindle is an important part of our lives. I'd have come across this article when I read the hard copy of the Sunday times, but I first saw courtesy of a tweet from Tobias Buckell, who is settling back from Gencon.

More Funny Books

After reading the third issue of the new Paul Leviz run on Legion of Superheroes... good first issue, awkward second issue, now with the third the series seems to be settling in to something I might like very much. I'm not the biggest fan of e DCU tendency to drown everything in crossover but there is some interesting Green Lantern stuff here that doesn't require a doctorate to follow and which has a nice portent to it. One subplot that seemed incomprehensible in the second issue has a comprehensible conclusion here. There is another page promising some interesting subplot and then we've got Darkseid in the final page. And Paul Levitz has always done good Darkseid. I also like the art by Yildiray Cinar and Francis Portela on pencils and Wayne Faucher and Portela on inks. The Legion are teenagers and in most instances the art looks like strapping teens in spandex, Earth-Man and Colossal Boy maybe not so much but most of the others most of the time. Which is kind of settling but the state of giving any real life teenage quality to teenagers on comics is so low that even the half approximation here is a pleasant surprise. But as this shows signs of settling into a groove why is the Adventure part of the new Legion so not doing it for me?

More happy news on Wonder Woman 601. The special issue 600 was godawful so it is indeed a pleasant surprise to report that new series writer J. Michael Straczynski has come up with a winning relaunch here. Quick origin recap going back to bare basics of the story with WW the sole remaining Amazon with a mission to save pockets of survivors and keep ahead of the bad guys long enough to realize her own potential. Stripped down even more with no invisible jet though she can hang on to the outside of a plane. Don Kramer and Michael Babinski chip in with art to match. Nothing flashy. But good storytelling and a down to earth feel that matches the story. Sweet!

Quick bad news: As with the TV show the weakest issues of The Simpsons comic are the dress up ones where the Simpsons characters are inserted into some other fictional story or historical epic. Ragnorak, Superman etc. get the treatment in the highly disposable #168. Time Masters: Vanishing Point is a one-and-out. iZombie written by sf/ f writer Chris Roberson is like too many other new Vertigo series. Lots of interesting ideas to fill a first issue but then the story doesn't cohere and goes hither and yon. Nicely stylized art by Michael Allred but it's too everywhere and nowhere. Unwritten, Air, I could say this same thing for too many of these. Vertigo editor Shelly Bond maybe has a talent for finding ideas but if can't get more of these books to a 25th issue...

Happier tidings on Futurama 50. Always better as a comic than as a series. This issue is not only a pleasant romp thrall things Futurama but comes with a nifty poster.

And issue #3 of DCU: Legacies covers the Silver Age. This era for DC isn't as intrinsically interesting as that covered in the first two issues but is interesting enough and the pitch perfect art by Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez makes for a nice backup story. Even good art by Dave Gibbons can't help the backup story about the Challengers of the Unknown and Sea Devils who are comic book footnotes dragged out often as trademark laws require.

The 3rd issue of Red Hood: The Lost Years came out this week. It's digressive, but thoroughly entertaining. Since this was a light week, I also decided to get the new issue of Red Robin, which I'd read for a few issues several months ago, then not. Issue #15 was fine. Even though it was the third part of a story, I was able to pick it up in midstream without any trouble. Red Robin, who's kind of the 3rd Robin, or is it the 4th Robin, as a grown-up calling himself Red Robin, devises a plan to put off a reporter who thinks she's discovered the secret identities of the entire Batman clan. The mechanics of the deception are nicely done in a kind of Mission Impossible way. The art is OK other than for one panel on page 5 of the current Robin "Robin" that looks really weird. Maybe I'll try again next week.

Inception

Whatever else we can say about Inception, it's not a masterpiece. Not even close.

A masterpiece wouldn't be a half hour too long.

In particular, when we get to the scene where somebody's dreaming about On Her Majesty's Secret Service, we just don't need this. We really don't need endless sequences of men in white ski uniforms, very attractive white ski uniforms I'll admit and if I ever take up skiing I want to ski headlong into a tree and die wearing one of these, skiing and skiing and skiing all around Telly Savales's secret mountaintop lair only there aren't as many women in this one. No, we don't need this at all. Did James Bond dream about being married to Teresa? I'm thinking maybe that's the giant secret message of the movie.

Too much like some long never-ending boring action scenes in movies like the 2nd Narnia movie or a Transformers movie, I had no interest in watching all of this gobbleskigook from a character standpoint. There aren't any real characters. They're dreams. They can't die except maybe they can except really they can't. The one thing Inception has going for it over those other movies is that I at least had some intellectual curiosity in what was happening, to see where the direction was going with all of it, and so mostly I stayed awake. Points to Inception.

A masterpiece wouldn't be full of poorly drawn and underwritten characters.

Some people have said Ellen Page was mis-cast. I'm not sure any other actress -- and what actress does anyone have in mind for the role, Miley Cyrus maybe, or Amanda Seyfried -- could really have played the part because there is no part. I kind of like Joseph Gordon-Levitt. He was great in [500] Days of Summer, The Lookout, Stop-Loss. Here, he's acting throughout the entire movie with a facial expression that suggests either he's trying to hold it in or that he's wearing this really really nice suit for good chunks of the movie only he forgot to put on his belt and maybe if he scrunches his face enough it will keep the pants from falling off. Why is he doing this? Well, I'm not sure what I would do if I had to play his role, so why the hell not act like his pants will fall off at any moment.

That being said, there's also some nice acting going on in the movie. Cillian Murphy who has been so good in some things (Red Eye, The Wind That Shakes The Barley), and so bad in some others (The Scarecrow in the Batman movies), is actually quite a delight to watch here. Leonardo DiCaprio has a juicy role and gets it right. Marion Cotillard is very good. I'd have happily seen Michael Caine's role expanded five-fold. All I'm kind of saying is that a masterpiece doesn't have Marion Cotillard giving a performance of grace and subtlety while Joseph Gordon-Levitt is looking for the suspenders he wore in [500] Days of Summer.

Hans Zimmer has this unusual career doing bad music for overblown films with the occasional brilliant score. He's excellent here, not quite as good as Rain Man which has a few hummable things in it, but he's doing some great work here. There's some excellent production design and photography and all kinds of stuff like that, where if the movie had a good budget you can see that it was very well spent on getting good people to do the little things right. Alternating with the ski scenes that I wish hadn't been in the movie at all, we had some scenes set in a hotel where people are fighting as their frame of orientation keeps wanting to change, not unlike what you might see if you read Brandon Sanderson's The Way of Kings in a few weeks. Those scenes are very good. Ski scenes, I really do think James Bond has done pretty much what you can do with a ski scene.

A masterpiece would have some of the most intense dreidel imagery of any mainstream movie ever made. If you don't know what a dreidel is, find out. Because every time that top went spinning, that's all I was thinking about.

I saw the movie with Peter V. Brett, his French publisher Stéphane Marsanne, and writer Myke Cole. Myke was seeing it for his second time and likes the movie very much. Peter liked it a little bit more than I but wasn't in love. We exchanged glances at one particularly gibberishy line which tried to explain how they could go deeper by going shallower. I don't have the best read on Stéphane's reaction. He did say, and I would agree, that Inception is definitely a better movie than The Matrix. Which is kind of saying something.

So yeah, I'm happy to talk about the movie more and be part of the conversation. It is genuinely nice to have a summer movie that we can talk about and think about and muse about. Just don't ask me to say it's a masterpiece, and don't ask me to see it a second time, and don't ask me if that spinning dreidel in the last shot is likely to land on the "n" or the "g."