One of the reasons I’m so busy right now is that I’m trying to find a place to live in Washington DC. Finding a place is annoying enough generally, but it’s especially aggravating this time because I’m not in DC, and can’t actually see these places in person. So I’m spending a lot of time trolling craigslist, trying to sift the useful listings from the ugly, overpriced, desolate, and creepy ones. Not to mention the thinly-veiled ads.
Which is all to say that I’m getting really sick of seeing listings claiming that apartments are three blocks from the metro when anyone who knows the city (or, um, has ever been to the apartment) knows that it’s at least seven blocks away. And that’s a generous calculation. It’s not three blocks, it’s never been three blocks, and unless they pave over Willard, Swann, Riggs, and Corcoran streets, it will never be three blocks. So we’re talking about brazen deceit here, not “putting yourself in the best light” or however we characterize the piddling inaccuracies that riddle our resumes and facebook profiles.
Now, in the bad old days, this kind of thing might have been more effective. But we’re a bit better equipped to assess these claims. Why bother lying, when the truth is so easy to suss out? I Guess We’ll Never Know.
After I take the bar, maybe I’ll have time for posts based on something other than my site visitor logs (or cut-and-pasting from someone else’s blog). Until then…
I’ve been thinking about my most popular posts, in terms of hits (most coming from web search sites). The common thread is that Googlers really want to know how to do stuff: how to reset their ipods, how to block the stupid video on ESPN’s homepage, and how John Basedow died in the tsunami (or not).
The first two links (A and B) consistently get more hits than the rest of my blog, combined. The ESPN one, I get—it was linked by Deadspin, and actually fixes a problem that lots of people have. But the iPod one is even more popular, and the actual content of the post is basically just a series of links to other, useful sites. I don’t understand it.
And the John Basedow post is not actually that popular, but it is a personal favorite, especially since the lazyweb came up big and I now have the mp3 of the John Basedow theme song, of which I will never tire.
Hey, Common Sense Dancing did it again. EW has another list up, of “the New Classics”—movies of the last 25 years. The ones I’ve seen are in bold, the ones I’ve seen and loathed are in bold/italics (spoiler alert: the movies I hated are Hoop Dreams, Drugstore Cowboy, and Napoleon Dynamite). Enjoy this fascinatingself-indulgent look into my likes and dislikes. (The last 90 movies, and my thoughts on the list, after the jump.)
1. Pulp Fiction (1994) 2. The Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001-03) 3. Titanic (1997)
4. Blue Velvet (1986) 5. Toy Story (1995) 6. Saving Private Ryan (1998)
7. Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) 8. The Silence of the Lambs (1991) 9. Die Hard (1988) 10. Moulin Rouge (2001)
What is it with Steven P. Jobs and batteries? On Friday, Apple’s new iPhone went on sale (for a mere $199; how does that make you early adopters feel who stood in line last year for the privilege of plunking down three times that amount? Just wondering.) In their reviews of the new device this week, both The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal pointed out that the iPhone’s battery problem had gotten worse in the new iteration.
The original iPhone, you may recall, got “8 hours of talk time, 6 hours of Internet use, 7 hours of video playback or 24 hours of audio playback and more than 10 days of standby time,” to quote Apple’s public relations mantra. There were two catches, however. To get that long battery life, Apple had to forgo high speed wireless 3G, which chews up batteries. Second, if the battery did run down during the day, you couldn’t just swap it out for your backup battery, as you can with just about every other smartphone. The iPhone case was sealed tight. Looked cooler that way.
The new iPhone, of course, has wireless 3G — indeed, that appears to be the biggest improvement in the new model. And sure enough, it’s a battery-killer; according to The Journal reviewer, Walter S. Mossberg, the new iPhone battery lasts only about four and a half hours before it needs a new charge. Yet Apple still insists on sealing the case, thus preventing customers from using a spare battery when it runs down. For heavy cellphone users—and who isn’t these days?—the battery is going to need a charge by lunchtime. Good luck with that. Unless Apple does something about its battery problem, the iPhone will always be more a toy than a tool.
Or maybe people will just charge their phones more often. THE HORROR!! At any rate, the 3G iPhone’s horrific battery life isn’t, in fact, any worse than the other 3G phones on the market (in most cases, I believe, it’s actually better). So the issue here isn’t Apple, it’s the industry as a whole. Better battery life is a worthy goal, but singling out Apple for what is really a industry-wide chipset problem is kind of silly.
Also, the lack of a replaceable battery isn’t just an “it looks cooler” choice. It allows Apple to use non-standard batteries, custom-fitted to whatever space the iPhone’s internal design allows. Designing for replaceable batteries requires a designer to make other concessions (size, weight, durability, cost, etc.) that might be more irritating.
To be honest, this is a reviewer’s problem more than a real life problem. Battery life is something easy to measure and easy to criticize (critics did the same thing with the iPod’s features for a long time—how’d that work out?), while user interface and hardware design are difficult to quantify (more on this from Daring Fireball). So everything that Apple excels at gets lost in the shuffle of a simple (and deceptive) feature checklist. Would you rather have an ugly, awkward, pain-in-the-ass phone that gets eight hours of battery life, or a really useful, intuitive, powerful handheld that gets four hours? I get the impression that most reviewers would recommend the former, but it’s safe to say that most consumers want the latter—and are happy to pay a premium for it.
All of that isn’t to say that the iPhone’s battery life isn’t annoying, but for 90% of people it really won’t be an issue. Those who really need more battery life will, no doubt, be able to buy external battery pack gizmos, just like they have been doing for the iPod for many years. And if battery life is more important than data speed, consumers can facilitate it: they can just turn off the 3G radio, which allows the device to use the EDGE network instead, with slower data but better battery life.
What this “problem” comes down to is that the iPhone is so much more useful than just about every other phone on the market that people will be glued to it all day long. Of course that uses more battery, but it’s really a symptom of Apple’s success. If your product’s biggest problem is that people like using it too much, I’d say you’re in the catbird seat.
* Incidentally, the column starts out, “If I were a blogger, these are some of the posts I would have written this week.” Which is kind of an odd start, but is actually much odder when you look at the bottom of the page and see: “Joe Nocera’s new blog, Executive Suite, can be found at nytimes.com/executivesuite.” Huh?
Game-ism’s most recent post is about Nike’s designs for this summer’s Olympics, and there’s a lot of really cool stuff there, including the Ippeas—a riding boot designed by Nike, drawing from motocross, track & field, and other sports’ designs. It’s pretty fascinating how Nike applied contemporary design to a very traditional sport:
What I’ve read in bold (the one I hated in bold italics). This is a pretty pathetic showing, but I’ve been busy lately. I hope to get to a number of these soon—or at least see the movie version!
1. The Road , Cormac McCarthy (2006) 2. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, J.K. Rowling (2000) 3. Beloved, Toni Morrison (1987)
4. The Liars’ Club, Mary Karr (1995)
5. American Pastoral, Philip Roth (1997)
6. Mystic River, Dennis Lehane (2001) 7. Maus, Art Spiegelman (1986/1991)
8. Selected Stories, Alice Munro (1996)
9. Cold Mountain, Charles Frazier (1997) 10. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami (1997)
I’ll be honest; this isn’t really the top 10 anything. Depending on how you count, it’s the top 9, top 15, or top 16 things I want changed about the iPod Touch. But I hear people like top 10 lists, so I thought I’d try to entice you with the post title. With that caveat, let’s get to business.
I have a new toy, an iPod Touch. I just got it last week, and I have been having a lot of fun with it, especially using Safari to browse the web (on a tiny screen, but still—it’s pretty nice not to have to boot up my laptop to check my email and Twitter feed).
But not to worry, there’s still plenty of room for improvement. Apple is set to release version 2.0 of its mobile operating system (which runs on the iPhone and iPod Touch) early next month. With that in mind, here are the ways the fanciest iPod model needs to be fixed—just through software (and note that most of these changes could, and should, be implemented in the iPhone as well). Let’s hope we see these features in just a couple of weeks.
When you air a standard definition (“SD”) program on your lovely high definition (“HD”) channel, please do me a big favor. Do not stretch it out to fit the screen. Just give it to me in SD, and let me decide what to do with it.
The biggest perpetrators of this horrific mistake (big enough that I made this list from memory of being infuriated in the past): TBS, TNT, the Food Network. But I’m sure there are other wrongdoers, and as the rest of the cable universe transitions to HD I suspect the problem will only increase.
ESPN does it right; when airing SD programs, it puts a bar on each side of the screen, so there’s no blank space on the tv, without warping the aspect ratio of the actual programming. Another option, which works fine for me, is just leaving the sides of the screen blank.
Here’s why those are better solutions: just about all HDTVs can stretch SD signals (which, to be fair, may HDTV owners prefer to do, because it fills the screen)—but they generally can’t reverse the operation (i.e., “de-stretch” signals). This is because when the TV detects an HD signal, it is to be expected that the programming is, you know, HD. So when, for example, I get Iron Chef stretched out on my screen, I have no recourse.
So, in summary, stop stretching programming out so that everybody’s face is too wide and things look incredibly stupid.
My name's Jake, and I live in Boston MA. I write about lots of stuff and you might be interested in some of it. You can reach me at calamityjake at gmail dot com.
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July 19, 2008 
Posted in Life 
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