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So, I own an iPad. (And here I am working for Adobe. You may point and laugh… now.) I’ve had it out in public—including in Europe, where I might as well have worn an “ask me about the iPad” t-shirt. I’ve got the pattern down now: someone does a double-take, and I think, “Oh, shit. Here we go again. ‘Yes, I couldn’t resist. I bought it because (reasons), and I’m (mood) with it.’”

I enjoy using my iPad (nicknamed “killer”, by the way), mostly. iBooks and the Kindle app have been perfectly stable, which is good, because the moment my ebook reader crashes, it’s not a serviceable ebook reader. It’s the kind of thing you need to have nailed down.

I’ve got about four pages of downloaded applications, only one of which consists of go-to apps: Twitter client, media streamer, remote keyboard and mouse. The rest are kind of a blur and a distraction. Games, magazines, utilities. I could do without them. That one page covers 95% of what I want to do.

What I can’t do is listen to NPR while I browse my email, and while I’ve been promised that will change this fall, I’m not a patient man. Nor am I the kind of fanboi who’s going to say the promise of multitasking tomorrow is as good as multitasking today.

There are about four things I expect out of a tablet: I want a good-looking screen, HD-quality video, the ability to run the occasional app in the background, and I want it to run all day on a single charge. The iPad meets two and a half of those requirements, if we take off a half-point for only playing 720p video.

Here’s the thing, though. Of my four main requirements, precisely zero of them are unique to Apple. Between now and Christmas, there are going to be dozens of Android-based tablets flooding the market. They’ll all be at or below the price point of the iPad. And you’ll be able to pick the winners fairly easily: they’re the ones that meet all four of my criteria.

So let’s say for the sake of argument that things shake out this way, and by the time you’re in an L-tryptophan coma, your Black Friday ads are loaded with non-iPad options. And let’s say the following morning you sneak into a Best Buy at 5am, scratch and claw your way to one of these devices, and start browsing the Android Market.

You are now invested in the success of Android.

When someone does a double-take in a coffee shop, you’re going to think, “Oh, shit. Here we go again. ‘Yes, I looked at the iPad, but I went with this because (reasons), and I’m (mood) with my purchase.’” The reasons are largely fixed in the hardware, so once you’ve rolled your Gooblet off the lot, you already have your answer to that. How you feel about your purchase, however, is going to depend largely on what you can do with it, and that has a lot to do with what software is available to you, and whether or how well it works.

There’s a tendency to be more forgiving of open-source platforms. Your Free Software Foundation adherents will insist that it’s better to have products that are clearly inferior because free-as-in-speech is better. But try telling that to your mom when she’s trying to make head or tail of your tablet while she maps out the nearest Apple Store.

For Android tablets to succeed, users of the platform need to fight the instinct to apologize for its shortcomings and that of its software. You need to be vocal, even brutal, about the problems you find. If an open-source product doesn’t cut it, call it out. If a payware application crashes left and right, let ‘em have it.

The tablet market is not the same as the Linux hobbyist market. The vast majority won’t be compiling their own apps, much less rewriting them. They shouldn’t be expected to. As a result, developers of tablet apps need to be very responsive to their users. If you want the Android platform to take off on tablets, the applications can’t be just great for Android apps. They need to be great apps, period. No editing text files, no byzantine dependencies, no open-source shovelware.

You, the user, should use all available avenues to establish the bar for your expected user experience, and hold developers to it. On the iPhone/iPad platform, ostensibly, the App Store serves as a quality filter. (In reality, there are mountains of shitty little applications, but there, the App Store at least does the service of letting us one-star them.) In the Android Market, users need to be just as brutal, demanding and vocal as they are in the App Store. Android tablets are not going to succeed by being almost as good as iPads, but, like, less evil. The best way to make them successful is to be very clear about where the system, the hardware and the applications fall short. The best way to make them fail is to pretend they’re good enough, when they’re not.

“Whenever people say, ‘We mustn’t be sentimental,’ you can take it they are about to do something cruel. And if they add, ‘We must be realistic,’ they mean they are going to make money out of it.”

Brigid Brophy, author

…and here’s what made me feel that way.

I just looked at the Italian World Cup squad on Wikipedia. Their birthdays are listed.

I am older than all but five of them (Cannavaro, Materazzi, Peruzzi, Inzaghi, and Del Piero, who’s five days older than me). That leaves 18 World Cup champions that are younger than me. This is problematic for me, because it means I probably won’t be able to get in shape for the next World Cup, and if I did, at 35 I’d be too old. Though I suppose my complete and utter lack of soccer-playing talent may be a larger obstacle.

Oh well. Back to my rocking chair.

My inbox contains fewer than 100 messages. It’s been 9 years since last I could say that.

Our move is complete. During the move, and the resultant settling in, I’ve spent a lot of time relieving myself of clutter. I sold a guitar, a couple of MIDI keyboards, and even did the first weeding of my CD collection since 1993. We sold most of our furniture, and we keep pruning. Fewer pieces. Fewer computers. Fewer gadgets. Fewer books. Fewer clothes. We may even get rid of our storage locker.

Of course, none of this is to say that we have become ascetics, disposing of the things we need along with the things we don’t. It does appear, though, that we are growing out of our desire for more, and into the desire for better. We want things that work as intended, things that solve our problems, things that serve many purposes. We don’t want to have cords cluttering our field of view; instead, we want free spaces for us to enjoy.

Our place is really coming together, and hopefully tomorrow I will rid us of all our remaining boxes from the move. Once that’s complete, the next phase will be to bring my online life into some semblance of order, including this blog and all of the other places I do my writing. Organization is the theme, and will continue to be the theme until it’s not something I have on my mind all the time.

I have an announcement I’ve been putting off until it’s official, but it’s close enough now. We’re closing on a condo next Monday. The signing is tomorrow afternoon. This is good for me because, as you may know, I’m just not doing much of anything lately.

We sold our first house (Chez Mew) last July, and have been living in an apartment complex that doubles as a dorm for the nearby performing arts school, so I can say without reservation that I am thrilled beyond rational thought at finally having a place of our own again. The new place is about six blocks from where we are now, and we’re on the top floor, in a building we’re told won’t be 300 degrees in the summertime.

Now, all I have to do is find time to get rid of many of my possessions, then pack, move, and get settled in while also not having an opportunity to take a day off until the first week of April.  I’ll do a video tour once we’re all moved in. (It won’t take long: there are only three rooms in the place.)

If you have problems being lucid for several minutes at a time, and as a result think you sound like an idiot, my advice is to try doing your show in a foreign language. Preferably one you have no business speaking. Once you’re done, if you’re like me, you’ll feel like you can go hours without falling victim to vocal vapor lock.

That’s what I did. Staccato 26 is in French. It took a month before I could actually make myself complete it. I finished the show by giving out my email, confessing I’m an American, and asking my francophone listeners to be kind.

I think I’ll be able to do #27 in my sleep.

Which is great, since it’s the only time I have available to do it. Anybody want to do some SQL for me?

If you’re going to be at SXSWi in a week and a half, you’re cordially invited to join us for a Saturday evening social event. It’s rather like a cotillion, except without dance cards, and everybody’s drunk.

It’s the inaugural South by Northwest party, though I’ve been calling it Bryght Blue Vine City. Whatever you call it,  this will be the event for folks who have waterproofed their PowerBooks, drink six-shot raspberry macchiatos, or remember seeing Nirvana in somebody’s basement back when they totally sucked. Do show up between 10:30pm and 2am and help me prepare for my first panel, Bode Miller sty-lee.

Oh, and don’t forget to bring your tough sIFR questions. Mike D loves those.

Staccato returns Saturday late Monday Tuesday.

Last year, we sold our house and moved into an apartment closer in while we looked for a condo. In the deal, we lost about half our square footage, which was all well and good, except for the massive space crunch that ensued. Ever since the move, we’ve been struggling to create a home where we each can be doing something in our own space without disturbing the other.

The first wave of this transition was to dump what we didn’t need. We disposed of desks, chairs, wine racks, untold quantities of clothing and media. That helped, but by no means were we out of the woods. Every month or two, we come back to shaving down the contents of our house.

Wave two was storage. We rented 25 square feet of space and filled that with the items that we need to keep, but don’t have to access regularly. Still, the space crunch continued to loom large.

We are now in wave three: optimization. Knowing full well that we can’t continue to add stuff and its associated visual clutter, and also that we can’t go the way of the minimalist or the ascetic, we’re working on ways we can keep the things we use regularly close at hand, and hide everything else. When we moved in, the space next to our television became a server rack, with two desktops, two printers, two LCDs, and more cables than you can shake a stick at. It takes up space, but worse than that, it creates visual noise and makes the place look like a geek lives in it. (duh.) My next major project is to pull out all of that gear and arrange it in the second bedroom, away from the living area, but still within reach both physically and via VNC.
Another problem area was the TV itself. Televisions are troublesome things when you’re working on interior design. They’re tethered to power and input sources, and tend to cause furniture to be oriented around them, which reduces face-to-face interaction and makes space management tricky. In the very near future, I expect to be able to hide away nearly all the components of our media center, but the next best thing is to have them out of the center of the room. We replaced our old TV with a front projector (the Optoma EP719, specifically), which we will mount on the wall above the couch, and move the stereo components just to the left. The space we gain back toward the front of the room is staggering. And more importantly, this will orient the living room to be less about TV and more about living.

All of my CDs are in two large footlockers in the spare bedroom. Their value to me at this point is merely archival, since they’re all ripped to MP3. I thought that maybe I’d move them to storage, but instead, I’m turning them into furniture. I’ll just flip them on their side, put some padding on the end, and slap a sheet of wood on top. The door-desk ethic in action. This will be where I make my studio, which has been so hard to set up and tear down that it just hasn’t been worthwhile to create new content these days. It will also be somewhere I can sit down and work without owning the entire living room.
I’m thinking about a few other changes down the road. I just read that the long-promised Ultrawideband Wireless USB adapters will be coming this spring, and that will give me the ability to move my iPod dock anywhere I choose, and still keep it synced. I’ll be able to put the printers wherever I want, too. New technology rules.

We’re just two people. We should have no trouble living in 900 square feet. But we don’t need to compromise our lifestyle in order to do it. I plan to have a space with an unobtrusive media center, a podcasting studio, and a relaxing living area by the middle of February.

Which, of course, is when we’ll be shopping in earnest for the new place.

Sigh.

…Creative Commons edition.

1. Become frustrated with outmoded ideas of the protection of intellectual property.
2. Found a non-profit organization to help.
3. Produce a viable alternative license.
4. Get millions of works licensed under it.
5. Produce other licenses to deal with realities in other countries’ legal systems, enable mashups, and effect other desired socioeconomic outcomes.
6. Ask for $225,000 to continue your work.
7. Get $250,000.
8. Then get $1,000,000 from an anonymous donor.

Couldn’t have happened to a more worthy organization, in my opinion. Congratulations, and thanks to whomever it was that coughed up the million. I’m sure they’ll use it to the benefit of everyone.