Miscellany of a Cheshire Cat

Apple announced the new, more colorful iPod shuffle yesterday. Yes, they look like tictacs or chicklets or some other colorful candy. And I don’t just want one! I want one of each color! The clip design is pretty impressive to being with - sturdy, utilitarian, stylish as all get out. Add color and you have an even bigger hit. (And, apparently, take a picture of 5 across some female model’s chest and you have your front page ad. I guess that’s not really out of the ordinary.)

Since it’s Apple, the only thing they have to change is the color to make a big splash. Same price: $79. Same size: 1GB. Same battery life: 12 hours. Same incredibly low weight: 0.55 ounce. But now, Apple’s product is even more prominent when you clip it to your coat, bag or shirt. As an added bonus, it’s now easier to find your shuffle in among a bag of cables and accessories too!

Now you can accessorize with your Shuffle in Silver, Pink, Green, Blue and Orange. The colors almost match the iPod middle child’s colors too. (The Nano comes in Silver, Green, Blue, Pink and Black as well as a special edition candy-apple red.) $79 is way cheaper than most high fashion accessories and the Shuffle is far more useful.

I have a Shuffle actually, one of the original pack-of-gum sized white plastic ones. I love it - it’s light, indestructible and feels like a Lego. I don’t use it nearly as much as I could but I love it on trips because it’s small, light and doesn’t need recharging all that often. I have utterly no need for any of these cute little colored clips that happen to also play music. None. But I still want them. All of them.

Think about it… I could pre-load each of them by mood.

• Green: Bouncy, work-out music
• Blue: Mellow, morning music
• Pink: Fast, intense music that makes me drive too fast
• Orange: Truly random music
• Silver: Romantic, sappy music

Luckily I really don’t need another iPod and I won’t be able to justify one and especially not 5! But wouldn’t it be fun? (And really, if I were going to do the above, wouldn’t it make way more sense to get a bigger iPod and make playlists? Hush! That is not the point!)

$79 seems a deal for a trendy and cute little 1GB music player. But then you see the iPod nano - still cute, but for a little over twice the price ($199) you can get 8x the storage! As you keep looking you discover that for a mere $50 more than that ($249) you can get almost 4x the storage of the nano and video capabilities by purchasing the full sized iPod. There’s definitely an opportunity to upsell yourself here. Depending on your needs, wants, wishes and desires, you may end up back at the Shuffle - it’s darned cute and 240 songs is enough for your commute all week. Or the Shuffle is a 2nd iPod, or the “go to the gym” iPod or the like. The iPod shuffle definitely has its niche, appeal and irresistibility combined with a sweet price point.

tags: apple, ipod, ipod shuffle, music

A cheetah on a winter afternoon

Originally uploaded by cce_photography.

From yesterday’s trip to the zoo - this cheetah has his spot and isn’t moving! This is just a teaser while I continue sorting through the photos to figure out what I’m going to upload.

We went out to dinner for my birthday last night. Pomegranate martinis are very tasty. My food was very tasty - lamb chops and sauteed spinach and mushrooms. The Fop’s restaurant karma kicked in and he ended up with food drama. It’s good that I don’t have any Bailey’s Caramel Irish Cream in the house. It is quite possibly the tastiest, most decadent liquore I’ve taken a liking to in ages.

tags: cheetah, dining, food, philadelphia zoo, photographs, photography, snow, winter, zoo

The Longwood Gardens photo set is up and viewable. (A blooming, fragrant butterfly bush is pictured here. No, don’t adjust your settings, you won’t be able to smell the picture.) A little bit of springy, flower happiness to start the week. Me, I’m more excited about the view out my window. The snow almost covers up the grass!

Yes, I’m pleased to announce that there’s finally some snow on the ground here that might stay more than a moment! We got about an inch of snow overnight. (Just in time for birthday glee!) I had planned to take today off and go to the Zoo anyway… the Zoo with a dusting of snow? Bonus. (Another feature was that I didn’t feel as crappy this morning as I did all weekend! Yay!)

So, I got a little trigger happy at the Zoo today. But you see, the animals that were out were vaguely active! And I could get shots I couldn’t previously because I think there were fewer than 10 visitors at the Zoo today. I do not exaggerate. I saw more employees than visitors.

By “trigger happy” I mean I took over 400 photos. The rapid-fire feature was definitely working. The Amur leopard has the most hypnotic eyes. The peacocks were out. One of the polar bears was not sleeping. The red panda was sleeping! I actually got to view the Giant River Otters without people in the way! Photos to come later as it took over an hour just to transfer from the card to my computer.

tags: butterfly bush, longwood gardens, philadelphia zoo, photographs, photography, snow, winter, zoo

Spot the genetic variation!

Originally uploaded by cce_photography.

Throughout Longwood Gardens there are beautifully arranged plants, meticulously maintained and arduously perfect. This is one of the reasons the little spot of red on this tulip delighted me so much. Here, after strolling through an acre or two of perfect, snow-white tulips and other arrangements constrained to uniformity, here was a rebel! Go, little tulip, go! I admit, after I took the picture, I looked around for the maniacal garden gnomes to come remove the offending petals or even the whole tulip in the name of returning the garden to its intended perfection. After all, this tulip is clearly the bastard offspring of a forbidden romance!

In other news, the gods hate me today in so many ways… But luckily, it’s Friday. I will perform the appropriate sleep-worship tonight and everything will be better in the morning.

So, those of you familiar with exotic coffee or Jon’s blog may be familiar with Kopi Luwak coffee. For the uninitiated or just intentionally innocent, this coffee bean is harvested after it’s been pre-processed through a luwak. Luwaks are little weasel-cat creatures that hang out in Indonesia snarfing down coffee cherries right from the bush. They’re pretty darned cute. The luwaks are also coffee snobs and apparently only eat the finest, most perfectly ripe coffee cherries. The coffee beans then go through the luwaks and is discarded for silly humans to collect. The silly humans do indeed collect the luwak droppings, dry them, clean the beans and roast the coffee beans. Silly humans.

So where am I going with this?

Well, the other night I was wandering around the Outlands in World of Warcraft when a friendly NPC gave me the following quest: A Rare Bean

The point of the quest?

“To the west you will find dung heaps left behind by the wildlife of Nagrand. You must search the dung for the digested remnants of the Nagrand caracoli. From this bean I am able to make a tablet that will aid you in your battle against the restless forces of nature.”

Yep, wander around the zone, look for rather large piles of poop, and right-click on them to “search” for the digested caricoli bean. As a reward you receive processed caracoli beans that allow you to breathe under water for 30 minutes. Pretty useful since after doing this quest you’ll want to wash your hands for a long time. There were many grossed-out comments about this quest in my guild’s chat channel this week. This amuses me since this game routinely has us carry around heads, hands, ears and other sundry body parts for quests. A little poo-quest and they’re all “ick! this is disgusting!” Silly boys.

tags: garden gnomes, kopi luwak, longwood gardens, photographs, photography, tulips, world of warcraft

Grey-leaved Euryops

Originally uploaded by cce_photography.

Another shot from Longwood Gardens. One of the fun things about low light and dark gray afternoon is that you can get some striking contrasts in your composition. I did not expect this photograph to come out as well as it did. I love how intense the yellow is and how deep and dark the background became. I also like the sense of depth and depth of field - the front flower is in focus while the two behind are beyond the focal point, the third slightly blurrier than the second. Perhaps I’m too hooked on having my focal depth as tiny as possible.

I sent in my membership to the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society today. The Philadelphia Flower Show is coming up. I went 2 years ago but skipped it last year. When I was living up North, the Boston Flower Show was a luxurious escape from Winter. Down here, the winter is much milder (more so this year) so the escape isn’t quite as necessary. Maybe by the first weekend in March there will be 3 feet of snow on the ground! A girl can dream, can’t she?

This morning, amidst a snow squal, a Nostalgia Electrics CCP509 Full-Size Popper arrived on the doorstep. Much glee all in one moment! (My birthday is Monday so there was little doubt that the sudden appearance of a popcorn popper was indeed a sign from the Birthday Gods. Oh, and the Fop clearly loves me.) I have, in fact, always wanted one and never been able to justify buying one. (A small part of me suspects that the Fop bought me a difficult to pack-up-and-move appliance in order to make it more difficult to move North.)

The snow was just a passing flurry. I am currently comforting myself with a bowl of freshly popped theater popcorn from the Fop-assembled popper. It’s Really Good Popcorn too. Crispy, crunchy, hot and yummy! Currently, the popper lives in the dining room making it convenient to the kitchen and the 3-prong outlets therein. It’s not like there’s much else for furniture in there anyway!

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Irony of the day: You can use iTunes to feed podcasts to your Zune. (This solution automates something you’d otherwise have to do rather arduously by hand. Apple likes to make things easier for all its users, even those stuck on Windows with a less-than-full-featured music player solution.)

tags: apple, flowers, irony, itunes, longwood gardens, philadelphia flower show, photographs, photography, popcorn, popcorn popper, snow, weather, zune

Grapefruit
Originally uploaded by cce_photography.

Finally! Snow! We got a dusting overnight twice this week with more predicted for tomorrow. The total accumulation might be a half inch. I’ll take what I can get. I love waking up to snow falling outside my windows. I’m less fond of waking up to snow falling inside my windows for obvious reasons. (And yet, the one or two times it’s happened, I have giggled.)

It’s been a freakish winter across the continent it would seem. The citrus growers in California are righteously screwed. I’m not looking forward to the price of citrus fruit going up. Then again, I haven’t seen much tasty citrus fruit in stores this past year either. I need to get back to the Good Grocery store this week anyway so I’ll try to retain some optimism for decent fruit in general.

Another photograph from Longwood Gardens - this time, grapefruit on the tree. I want a conservatory so I can grow citrus trees too!

The Conservatory at Longwood is enormous. The current display is titled “Winter Escape” - there’s still not much winter to escape, but who can refuse pretty flowers? There are 20 distinct indoor gardens housing over 5,500 species of plants. (I didn’t count, I’m trusting their documentation on this.) The original part of the Conservatory was built in 1919 and has been expanded to cover 4.5 acres over the years. The architecture is fascinating in and of itself. Strolling through the Conservatory is an incredible tour! The first few spaces I walked through were comfortable, then I got to the arid rooms followed quickly by the more tropical gardens. One long hall felt like a proper rain forest with species growing every-which-way and water dripping here and there.

The Conservatory gardens are meticulously tended and plants are lovingly arranged, staked and labeled. Yay for labeling! One visitor remarked, “Why don’t my gardens ever look this good?” My response was, “We don’t have a staff of 350 working in our yards!” I’m looking forward to visiting the grounds when it’s not raining or threatening to rain. The afternoon I went was wet and gray and thus my camera and I chose not to take long strolls through the grounds.

tags: citrus, conservatory, fruit, gardens, grapefruit, longwood gardens, snow, weather, winter

Yule Bonfire Photos

Originally uploaded by cce_photography.

I successfully uploaded my favorite photos from the Yule bonfire and Yule morning up in Plainfield, NH. Since Winter has finally shown its face on the East Coast, I thought the bonfire could warm us up a bit.

tags: bonfire, new hampshire, photographs, photography, winter, yule

Kumquat for your thoughts?

Originally uploaded by cce_photography.
Longwood Gardens has a huge conservatory that, were we having winter weather, would provide a haven from the cold and ice of winter. Despite the lack of winter, I ventured over on a gray, Sunday afternoon. It was delightful - and who can resist kumquat trees? The trees are almost as cute as the fruits themselves!

For want of actual original content, I present my “open tab”, aka things that made me giggle:

• Hovercat over at Two Lumps - if you don’t read Two Lumps, you should.
• Proverbial Lions at Questionable Content - witty obnoxiousness 5 days a week.
• PvP Online goes to the coffeehouse - PvP is not as geek as it sounds, I promise.
• I stumbled on John Scalzi’s blog, I don’t even recall how or when, but I keep reading it for many reasons including for his delightful randomness and updates from the feline front.
• Finally, Shakespeare’s Den has lots of random stuff, including the Avenging Unicorn Play Set (as seen on Life After Coffee), Poor Yorick Skull, and a Darwin Little Thinker doll.
• Okay, one last thing: If you missed it, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead is out on DVD and available from Amazon.com.

tags: blogs, citrus, comics, dvd, fruit, kumquats, photographs, photography, random, rosencrantz and guildenstern, toys

Now I’ve actually watched the keynote (The crib notes were pretty amazing! But I stayed up way too late watching most of the Quicktime version of it last night.)

AppleTV

Apple also announced AppleTV yesterday. It’s a pretty cool little box at a sweet price point! AppleTV brings the Mac to the living room allowing you to view everything you can view in iTunes right on your television. Movies, music, tv shows, podcasts, album covers… if you can enjoy it in iTunes, AppleTV allows you to enjoy it on your television. It has all the appropriate audio and video ports to connect to HD televisions. You’ll also find USB and Ethernet ports on the back and wireless (802.11n) built in. AppleTV will synch with one Mac quite happily. Just like an iPod, you can select what actually is moved over to the AppleTV from your computer (Mac or PC running iTunes). But that’s not all! It will also stream from another 5 computers. (I believe you can only have 5 computers authorized to connect at a given time rather than having a lifetime cap of 5. When you need to stream from the 6th computer, I expect you’d be able to de-authorize one of the other computers.)

The price is right: $299. And if that USB port can be used to connect additional storage, the 40gb hard drive becomes less prohibitive. It starts shipping in February and you can order it now over at the Apple Store.

AppleTV is a cool toy. I personally don’t watch much on my television (well, on the Fop’s television because I don’t really want to claim ownership to that monstrosity) so AppleTV isn’t very valuable to me personally. I can see how the Fop would have use for it more. If we had one, I would load music onto it for parties and when I’m kicking around the first floor as well as play with looking at my zoo photographs on the big screen. (Yes, I’m a little vain that way.) And maybe I’ll get into watching more video in iTunes over the next year…

And then, the iPhone demo…

I want the iPhone even more now. A lot more. I had full-on fangirl moments while watching the iPhone demo. The most amazing part is not the rich browser, the full e-mail client, the iPod functionality or the widgets. The most amazing, astound, revolutionary part is the interface itself. Apple took out over 200 patents during the development of this phone. Go Apple.

Remember yesterday I said that I didn’t want to have to remember the complex key combo to make my smart phone convert into a waffle iron? I’m pretty sure the iPhone can make waffles with fewer than 3 clicks of buttons labeled with intuitive icons.

The iPhone interface is just… smart.

Navigation is so incredibly simple. Touch the buttons, scroll up and down with a quick drag of the finger, and if you get lost (or just tired of playing with the Weather widget) there’s a handy-dandy Home button to take you back to the main screen. Apple has built in a cool little elastic band effect. If you drag your finger up and off the touch-screen (i.e. run over the top margin of the touch-screen) while browsing, whatever is in the window (songs, messages in your inbox, a Google map) keeps scrolling as if you gave the list momentum with your finger drag. It’s Very Cool.

The zoom feature - it’s a 3.5 inch screen which is big but still quite tiny. If you’re surfing a complete web page (the NYT was the example), you can double-tap the screen to zoom in on any point. You can also use a “pinch” move (opening or closing your fingers against the touch-screen). This multi-touch functionality is at least one of the patents.

The iPhone is an Apple product and therefore the switch between portrait and landscape display is beautiful and automatic when you turn the phone. Go, go, go accelerometer! Other terribly smart things the iPhone does include: pausing your music when you get a call, switching off your speaker when your bring the phone to your ear, and sensing the ambient light so it can adjust the screen brightness appropriately to your environment. Pretty cool stuff though not individually revolutionary.

Cover Flow

Cover Flow is quite possibly the coolest new feature of the iPhone. Cover Flow sounds like a fairly mundane feature and for some reason makes me think of surfboards. The demo on the Apple web site doesn’t do it justice. When you’re in landscape mode you can go into Cover Flow and scroll through the cover art of all your music. Drag your finger to move left or right, click a cover to view it (the album and artist info appears below the image quite helpfully), click again to go into the track list, keep clicking to select and play a song. It’s beautiful (and somewhat mesmerizing) and the closest thing to 3-dimensional data interaction I’ve seen on a 2-dimensional screen on a consumer electronic. As well as surfboards, this feature reminds me very much of descriptions of interacting with data in science fiction. If only the covers were flowing holographically in space for us to manipulate with our hands instead of just our fingers on this amazing little device…

A new revolution, thanks Steve!

Steve Jobs spent over an hour of the keynote just on the iPhone demo. I think I could have watched him play with the iPhone for another hour. It’s an incredibly device. Just incredible. I was ready to buy an iPhone, before touching one myself, just a few minutes into the demo. What did it? It runs OS X. OS X. On. A. Phone.

What makes this phone revolutionary is the innovation and the whole package. This touch-screen is amazing. Taking the keypad off the phone is almost as cool as taking the floppy drive out of the computer. This is not just an iPod+Phone device. It’s a tiny little Mac for your pocket that happens to also make phone calls.

tags: apple, appletv, iphone, macworld, os x, steve jobs, technology

The keynote at Macworld went well - AAPL is up $7+ today.

Apple Computer, Inc. is now Apple, Inc. which seems both insignificant and significant all at the same time. Remember when Apple changed from a color logo to a monochrome logo? Today’s name change is far more subtle but means far more. By dropping “Computer” they are admitting that their roots no longer account for their core business. It’s been a long and nail-biting wait, but I think it’s almost safe to say that Apple may have a stable future. I’ve always said that Apple isn’t going anywhere but now I’m almost convinced of this myself! Of course, I’m also a Red Sox fan, so I still worry even when things are going well. I wonder if Apple, Inc. finally paid off Apple Records sufficiently such that there will be no additional lawsuits. The last I heard was that Apple Records would appeal the May 2006 decision in the UK courts but that was months ago.

So, about that phone…

The iPhone has been announced! Let’s start with the important information, the size!

• Dimensions: 4.5 x 2.4 x 0.46 inches
• Screen size: 3.5 inches (diagonal)
• Screen resolution: 320 by 480 at 160 ppi
• Weight: 4.8 ounces
• Battery life: 5 hours of talk/video/browsing time or 16 hours of audio playback

My 3.5 year old 3rd gen 40gb iPod is 4 x 2.5 x 0.75 inches (approximately). My fairly new LG flip phone is 3.5 x 1.8 x 0.75 inches. And neither of them are nearly as cool as this iPhone! Size does matter, at the iPhone is a little bigger than I usually like my cell phones to be, but useful functionality will make up for needing to buy a new case! It’s a touch bigger (less than half an inch taller, the first dimension listed above) than the current video iPods and but the iPhone’s screen is considerably larger (3.5 inch cinema vs 2.5 inch).

That battery life doesn’t suck either!

That little screen… my first laptop, a Powerbook 165, only had a screen resolution of 640×400. Of course it was 4-bit grayscale and only had 128K (yes K, that’s smaller than MB and much much smaller than GB) of video memory.

But back to the iPhone. Other important details for us Mac heads:

• The iPhone won’t be available until June. Yes, June. Steve Jobs may be a god, but he’s a bloody tease too.
• It will debut on the Cingular network only - there’s a multi-year exclusivity contract in place.
• You’ll be able to buy them from the Apple Store and Cingular.
• There will be 2 sizes available, an 8GB model for - $599 and a 4GB model - $499. Expensive and a little small but the new Samsung BlackJack is $449 and other PDA/smart phones currently on the market run from $400 to $650 even with less functionality. (Base prices, before discounts from contracts, etc.)

A Thneed’s a Fine-Something-That-All-People-Need!
It’s a phone! It’s a camera! It’s an iPod! It’s a browser! It’s a WIDGET MACHINE!

Were you actually interested in the functionality? Yes, it runs widgets and a slim version of Safari! It also supports POP3 and IMAP mail. There’s a 2.0 megapixel camera built in as well as WiFi 802.11b/g, Bluetooth 2.0, Edge and Quad-band GSM. I can’t wait to try one of these out. Maps, weather, e-mail, music, not to mention all the classic cell phone features, only smarter!

Everything is done via touch-screen, no pesky stylus required. But do not fear! The qwerty touchpad is predictive which basically means that it will figure out what you’re trying to say rather than inputting your typos. From the various demos availalbe on Apple’s site, it looks like the rest of the interface will be as intuitive and slick as we’ve come to expect from Apple.

I’m really not one to combine my toys. I have resisted the combined cell phone + (camera, music player, video player, browser) for a long time. Call me a luddite, but I’d rather have 2 devices that work really well and do exactly what I want them to do. I don’t want to need to remember the magic key combination to make my cell phone convert into a waffle iron at some critical moment. That said, I think the iPhone may be the combo device that does it all well. Apple’s amazingly talent for intuitive design will save the world. Well, may save my world at least! …if only we didn’t have to wait until June…

tags: apple, iphone, macintosh, macworld, steve jobs, technology