RIP Steve Jobs

Today it was announced that Steve Jobs died at agee 56 from pancreatic cancer. 

Jobs was the creative talent behind such revolutionary devices as the Macintosh, NeXTSTEP, OS X, the iMac, iPod, iPhone, and iPad. My inner geek thanks you.

Now, may God have mercy on your soul and grant you pardon and peace. As the Scriptures day, "For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world, but lose his eternal soul?".

That is casting no aspersions on Steve Jobs; rather that is every man's destiny.  Tempus fugit. Momento mori.

Thank You Steve Jobs

Today I upgraded my iPad to undo the upgrade which took away one of the most useful features: the side switch orientation lock. This is not so important on an iPhone, but this is waaaayyy important on an iPad.

I don't care a fig about the other updates, and I don't care that you don't care -- I care!!

Family Tech Time

You know the old adage: the family that iPads together stays together - or something like that.
The Nodlings are just as excited about my new purchase as I am. Of course, part of that is simple novelty. However, it has borne some interesting fruit. Because it is so portable, yet large enough for more than one person to look at, the kids are clustering about like fruit flies.

We have done morning prayer via Universalis a couple of times with the Nodlings each taking turns reading one of the psalms aloud.

We tested out our chosen GPS application, MotionX GPS Drive HD, v4.1, by navigating to Grandma's house for brunch today and then "detouring" for gas in order to simulate our upcoming trip to my sister's out of state wedding. It gives directions just fine, but the voice directions only seems to know about major road names. Figuring out how to detour in the middle of a navigation was also tricky. Should work out fine.

Of course the Nodlings want to play the games on the iPad, so I downloaded some free apps: checkers, touch hockey, BrainPOP, tic-tac-toe, Let's Do Math, and Animal Fun. My littlest, Nib, loves the animal one. It just shows real pictures of animals and plays the sound that animal makes, says its name, and spells it. Nib squeals with delight for each and every animal and pushes the button to go to the next one. The interface is so simple a two year old can use it (most of the time). She ran around the house yelling "Ice pack! Ice Pack!". I had to laugh, "No baby, it's called iPad."

Tonight the Nodlings and I curled up on the couch and watched an educational clip on BrainPOP about Hellen Keller, took the quiz at the end, and finished up with a couple of levels of the Isaac Newton's Gravity game, where we had to figure out various puzzles based on gravity.
Even Grandma, who is not into tech toys, saw it and got excited. She can read books, look up recipes, flip through pictures of the kids, and get her email on one little simple device.

Anything that draws us together has to be a good thing, right?

Drinking The Kool-Aid

I've never had a new electronic device when they were new.

That is to say, I always wait a couple of years for the price to come down and all the bugs to get worked out before I sally in. That's a bit strange for a guy who been into computers for his whole career. I don't even have a smart phone (Blackberry, iPhone, Droid), just a plain cell phone - hey, it makes calls!

But I've got lots of other things to spend my money on, and 5 Nodlings to help me realize my proper priorities. But this time, it was different. I got a bonus for getting someone hired on at my work place which put a little unexpected cash in my hands. We have an upcoming trip to my sister's wedding in Cape Cod and I needed a GPS among other things. A 12 hour car trip means we need lots of diversions for the Nodlings: books, DVD player, games, video games, music, etc.

Adding up the cost, I found it was much easier to buy an Apple 64GB iPad Wifi +3G. It does all that and more. With the 3G cellular enabled, I can take this on the road and get directions, connect to the internet, etc.


I have to say I'm still in the first flush, but I am loving it. The iPhone was always super cool, but there wasn't enough real estate on it to suit me. Now, with the iPad there is. Sure, it doesn't fit in my pocket like a cell phone, but it's small enough to carry around easily (a little smaller than a sheet of paper).

It hold all of my music, a bunch of photos I want to look at later (and for the wedding), eBooks, games, maps, GPS, driving directions, email, Web, calendar, Yellow Pages, and a lot more. Currently, I'm ripping some movies from DVD that I'll want to watch on vacation.

This is the one that put me over the final edge: Universalis. Now I can pray the Liturgy of the Hours easily on the iPad. No more flipping pages and looking up the readings for me. Plus it cost $25 versus $200 for the full dead tree version.
Call me an Apple Fanboy if you want, just keep passing the Kool-Aid!