Why do you like art?
This sunday morning my daughter was doing her homework, sitting next to me. While trying to find excuses not to do her actual homework she asked if I liked mathematics. “No”, I said, and with fully risking to offend lots of people I can say that I never had the feeling that mathematics in school were related to getting anything done in real life. “So what do you like” she asked (and she asked that in german with her french accent) and I answered: “English I liked, but mostly Art”. “Art?” she asked further, “but why?”. So I take a piece of scrap paper and draw this.
“What’s this to you?” I asked. She replied “a box with a line inside”. “But what else?”. A mouth, a strip of road, a snake, a window (if you turn it 90°), the horizon, the border of a table..that’s why I like art: As a source of inspiration, a tool to develop an idea or feeling, to share, to kick off a thought process, as the outcome of a thought process which then makes someone else think and so on. I heard twice this weekend that we leave not a lot behind, once from my father who looked back on his working life, once in a movie. Most of the things we do are “in the system”, and as the system is reinventing itself, others take our place and wipe out what we thought would last. But Art. It’s not replacable, not redoable because there is no possibility for re-doing art, only for copying it. But the initial work remains (until someone throws it away like I will do with my paper).
This paper, by the way, was the delivery note of my proof-prints for the novel I wrote.
My Nook
Two books worth 20 USD each in my hands I was standing in front of the cashier at Barnes and Noble in St. Paul. The Nook in front of me was advertised at 136 USD (120-something plus the incomprehensible and confusing sales tax). The books would cost 9$ each as an eBook, plus I would have access to the Barnes & Noble online store an be able to buy eBooks “right now”. The “right now” is important to me – if I read about something, I want to read on without waiting weeks for english language books being delivered through mysterious ways to France
I’m biased with eBooks and readers. We do run a book store in Cruseilles and eBooks are sort of “the enemy” to book stores, aren’t they?
But back to the Nook, first. The low-cost Nook has a touch screen, an eInk-Display and six buttons – one to switch it on and off, one to wake it up and to get to the menues. The other four buttons are used to scroll up and down – two on each side. That’s it. The display is a touch screen. The software on board allows to connect to the store and content can either come in that way or through the (supplied) USB cable.
While I was in the US, I was easily able to purchase books in the online store. To get my newspapers on the reader I installed Calibre, an Open Source eBook and content management tool. Calibre is pretty cool – it downloads stuff from various sources, a lot of them free, and converts it to pdf or epub so you can read it conveniently on the reader.
Reading with the Nook is excellent – the device has no internal light, I depend on the surrounding light. But even a flashlight in a tent is sufficient to read. In that characteristics, the Nook is close to a real book. The page flipping works fine, the text changes fast enough. On the cheap version (which I have), forget about images and graphics. It’s good for text, but not more.
While the upscale Nook Color has tools to read email, mine does not – and I’m happy with that. If it would do anything else but “present text to be read” I’d be drawn away from the text sooner as I could switch pages.
I do like the reading experience and am proud to say that I’ve read more books in this short amount of time than I remember reading .. for long. What comes in favor of the thing is the light weight, the good display and the “open” (enough) design. In the worst case I can even put PDF via the USB connector from any pc or mac on the Nook. Pretty cool.
The one book which is impossible to read is the Headfirst PMP book – they do use a lot of graphics and the Nook fails to display. Pity..so back to the Netbook for that one.
Adding content via the B&N online store fails from europe (“we only deliver to customers in the US”) but if you accidently have a vpn tunnel open and the endpoint has an us ip address, things just work fine.
Am I scared for the book store? Not really. Books will have a place in the future. The Nook is nice but it’s not a book 
justmobile.ie and the iphone
Holy moly, I managed to connect. If anybody else has the issue, here’s how you get your iphone connected to justmobile.ie:
- Get a sim card in one of the stores. I got the sim card for free (that’s May 2011).
- Top up whatever you need to top up to get data access (I needed to put 18 EUR)
- Sign up for the plan (in May 2011 you need to text JUSTRIGHT to 087 377 1818)
- Now go somewhere where you have (free, grin) Wifi and your Mac (plus a pint of a beverage of your choice).
- Download and install the iPhone Configuration Utility.
- Create a new profile and only change the advanced settings by adding a new APN (isp.justmobile.ie) as described in a different context here. The APN is the network access point you need to use (“the gateway”).
- Connect your iPhone, deploy the profile (see above for details) without signing
- I went to Airline mode once and back to “re-register” on the network but I don’t even know if that’s really necessary.
I was surprised that such a thing as the iPhone Configuration Utility existed (I was not surprised that it worked, though). It prevented me from jailbraking the phone 
Update: Tethering does not work without jailbreaking.
My iPhone identity.
I’m actually not overly surprised that Apple and Google track where we are when. But the fact that I’m not surprised should not say that I don’t think that they are way out of any acceptable behavior. Not for storing the location data on the phone. But for sending it home. And for not permitting a user to disable the function.
I have stopped to use my iPhone as a Phone a long time ago as the pure phone quality was unsatisfying, so the graph above is historical data..and brings back some good memories on some motorcycle trips