A Weekend of Highs and Lows

This past weekend was one of extreme highs and lows for me. First the highs.

For several years now I have been studying a martial art called To-Shin Do (which loosely translates as "way of the sword and spirit"). It is a modernized form of Ninjutsu (a.k.a. Ninpo, Taijutsu, etc.) that was founded in the United States by Stephen K. Hayes. He had travelled to Japan, and learned the art from Masaaki Hatsumi, the last master of nine ancient lineages ("ancient" here being about 900 years) then brought it back to teach it here. My instructor, John Poliquin, is Mr. Hayes' senior student, and an accomplished martial artist in his own right (he held a black belt in Judo before meeting Mr. Hayes). It is sheer coincidence that a Quest Center (as To-Shin Do schools are called) is located nearby, and is run by an instructor like Mr. Poliquin. In Maine, of all places.

This past weekend Stephen Hayes was in Portland conducting a seminar at my Quest Center. Along with forty or so of my fellow students I trained under his instruction from seven to nine on Friday night, and again from nine to noon Saturday morning. It was worth the money, the time, and the pain (though I've been at this for some time, I'm still just a beginner, and I'm fighting my own out-of-shape body and lazy tendencies every step of the way). I don't know what more to say about it than that. this is the second time I've met Mr. Hayes, though this was in a smaller group, and a more intimate setting (and I am further along in my training) all leading to a more satisfying experience. Mr. hayes himself has always been upbeat and absolutely thrilled to be doing what he's doing, something that he passes along to others. I may not have learned a whole lot this weekend, in literal terms, but what I got was a glimpse of things to come, a chance to observe and learn a bit from a master, and a renewed excitement about what I'm doing (in the picture below, I'm the one on the left, if there was any doubt).



Now for the lows.

Sunday morning Laura and I realized that we had not seen one of our cats, Casey, since Friday. It isn't unusual to not see him all day, especially on hot days, since he likes to hang out in the basement where it's cooler. It was almost noon the next day, however, and his absence was noticed. On a whim I went downstairs to look for him. I found him curled up in an empty rubbermaid bin, dead.

From the look of things (I'll spare the details) he either had an aneurism, or he had severely injured his head. What it comes down to is that it was a fluke (and not something that would endanger our other two cats or dog), it was fast, and there's nothing we could have done. There's some consolation in that, faint though it may be. He's the first of our pets - meaning belonging to my wife and myself together - to die. He wasn't even four years old. Pets dying before you do is an inevitability, but we didn't think we'd have to deal with this for at least another five or six years.

Casey was always a bit off. Sick more than our other pets, clumsy, slightly schizophrenic in his behavior, but he was always lovable. He would demand attention, loudly, then run away when you tried to give it to him. If you could catch him before he got away he would melt into your arms, purring and kneading like he'd never been loved before. We have a small fountain for the cats (they prefer it to a simple bowl), and Casey's method of drinking from it was to stick a paw under the running water, shake it furiously as if surprised that it was wet, and only then drink. He would often misjudge jumps, or clean out whole shelves full of small items with his tail. His favorite treat was salsa and cheese sauce (not one or the other, but both mixed). Whenever we had some we would put a little on a chip for him, he'd lick the chip clean and then we'd give him a little more. Doing this three or four times was the only sure way to get him to leave us alone. He was annoying, demanding, frustrating, spoiled, impish, and we already miss him terribly.

Luna, Casey's sister, and our dog Markus, seem to have noticed his absence. They usually leave me alone during the day, but they've both been desperately clingy. Maybe I'm reading more into that than is there, I don't know. And I guess that's all there is to say. The big, dumb, lovable fuzz ball had a good life, I hope, he was loved and cared for the best we knew how.

I work from home most days, and the second chair in my office had more or less become his during the day. Today it was empty.

iPhone Follow-Up

This is just a (not so) brief follow-up to my last post about the iPhone. It's been two weeks without anything new, so it's about time. I'm working on a more substantive post that should be up shortly.

Some of you may have noticed the "iPhone..." tab at the top of the page. If you click on it, you'll find that it takes you to a stripped down version of this site, conveniently sized for viewing on the iPhone's small (but very dense) screen. I placed that there shortly after the iPhone was released in anticipation of actually toying with one. I wasn't sure if the built-in Safari browser was going to live up to expectations, so I wanted to have two versions of the site to check out. Though I know I can't get one, at least not for some time, I still needed to play with one for a bit, just to see if my speculations held up.

About a week after the release of the iPhone I found myself at an AT&T Store in front of an unoccupied iPhone, and there I touched the future.

"Hyperbole!" I can hear the more literate among you crying. "Bullshit!" the rest of you scream. Hey, call me a fan-boy if you want, but the first thing I said when someone asked me what it was like is "it's like holding the future in your hand." Honest to God (or Buddha, Allah, Odin, Zeus, take your pick), I did. The interface worked as advertised, and though it's not perfect, it holds an almost ridiculous amount of promise. The screen itself is bright and crisp, and the the touch controls are responsive and very fast. Moving through lists, flipping through albums and photos, all works just as I'd hoped it would. Sitting here at my desk afterwards I had to refrain from touching the screen of my iMac to flip through things, it's just that intuitive and natural.

The on screen keyboard wasn't the easiest to use, but the auto-correct feature I mentioned last time works so well that it almost doesn't matter. I don't know what kind of spelling engine they've employed, but the sooner I can get that in a word processor the better. The trick is to stop worrying about being 100% accurate and to just type away. Nine times out of ten, and probably more often than that, it knew exactly what I had intended to type, and this after only five minutes or so. Apparently it learns, building a database of words you commonly misspell so as to stay one step ahead of you (as I understand it).

One control I wasn't too sure about before hand was the "pinch" interface for navigating photos. Basically, to zoom in on a photograph you place two fingers on the screen and spread them apart. To zoom back out, you do the same but move your fingers closer together. In imagining this I'd thought it backwards, that you would want to zoom in by focusing on smaller bits of the photo. I'm fairly certain I thought this based on dealing with the navigation interfaces in programs like Photoshop. When you're physically touching the screen, however, it makes perfect sense. Think of it this way: You place your finger tips on points A and B, which are, say, 1 inch apart. Now spread your finger tips apart so that points A and B are two inches apart. Points A and B on the photo have not changed position relative to the photo, they have simply gotten further apart, so the photo is enlarged to compensate. Once you've done it you can't imagine doing it any differently given the touch interface.

As for the browser. Oh, my, the browser. This by itself is almost reason enough to want an iPhone. If you've ever used a browser on a cell phone before, you know that by and large they are crap. Even the decent ones, like Opera, suffer from the phone's control scheme. When loading a page on the iPhone it is rendered nearly perfectly (I did notice some elements shift slightly on this site, but not much), and scaled down to fit the width of the screen. To move around you slide the page with your finger as you do with lists and photos. If you want to see a particular part of the page - and here's the cool part - you double tap on it and the view is zoomed in. This is not a generic on-size-fits-all zoom either, the specific element you tapped on, be it a paragraph of text or an image, is zoomed in to perfectly fit the screen. It's brilliant, and once you've done it it makes perfect sense. I do admit, however, that you would be hard pressed to figure this out without being told first.

That is true of many aspects of the iPhone, and in that respect alone was I disappointed. But only a little. A few times I got lost, or stuck in a screen and unsure how to get out. Generally the answer is either "tap anywhere on the screen" (which will bring up controls), or find a small (too small) "X" button to tap (or something similar, I didn't use it for long, and it was a week ago). Once you know that it's simple enough. It's roughly akin to using an iPod. Once you're told that holding down the Menu button turns it off you don't have any trouble doing it, but you probably wouldn't have figured it out on your own. I don't mind, really, as this is a very complicated device that is almost very easy to use. It does it better than most.

Speaking of "most", I was telling someone about my previous post when it occurred to me that my cell phone does, in fact, have a one-button way to turn the ringer off. Hold down either the # or * button for three seconds to turn it off, and again to turn it back on. The problem is the "either". It's one or the other of those, and I can't for the life of me remember which one. This wouldn't be so bad if the other did something innocuous, but instead it locks the keypad. I set the unlock code two years ago when I got this phone, and can never remember what it is. Obviously, I always manage to figure it out, but the fact remains that choosing the wrong button in this case means having to take ten minutes to unlock the damn phone before I can use it again. At some point I subconsciously decided to forget this function existed, because one too many times I'd done it wrong and seriously inconvenienced myself. That's exactly, point for point, the kind of problem I was talking about last time.

I also had to change the backdrop on my mother's cell phone over the weekend, again, because she had somehow set it back to the default. I won't say much about it, except to ask what sub-genius decided that this feature should not be accessed through the "Display" menu, but rather through the "Camera" menu (even when it's not a picture you've taken using the camera)? Sheesh.

So anyway, how did my little "Life of Convenience: iPhone Edition" experiment work out? Given the quality of the built-in browser, having a special version of this site for the iPhone is unnecessary, but I still like it. It is slightly easier to read, and aesthetically it matches the iPhone better than the full version. It's also very easy to maintain, given that it updates automatically when this site does, so I think I'll leave it there for now. Let me know what you think.

And now, I'll leave you with this quote from this post over at Penny Arcade in which Tycho sums of some of my feelings about the iPhone more eloquently, or at least more interestingly, than I'm capable of doing (the emphasis is mine):

Having serviced Macs at one point in my illustrious IT career, I understand that there is simply an Apple Way of doing things, and it is often a very, very good way but it's still their way as opposed to some natural ratio of the universe. It's not universal, and there are strange blind spots, but there is a reason that their chosen people hoist the banner. My old phone, one based on Windows Mobile 5.0, had almost every feature the iPhone has - point by point. The differences between the products (like the differences between their desktop cousins) have to do with how functionality is exposed to the user. In this matter, you'll find that Apple's product is almost infuriatingly superior.



I have been waiting for the ability to manipulate technology by pressing dynamic symbols for basically ever. If you find such things unpleasant, then I suggest you develop a taste for forced labor because by the year twenty-twenty all that sneer is going to get you is a slot in the underclass boiling corpses. Get with the fucking program. Come and touch the neon glyphs.

Amen to that (I'm still waiting for a car with a dashboard comprised of graphical widgets I can rearrange, or a stereo or DVD or microwave with same).

You know, it might be time to break open the piggy bank...