A postcard from France landed in my mailbox on Monday (not for me : it’s just for an address close to mine, so I will put it back in the mail). But hey – let me check out this postage stamp first, I thought. It celebrates the bicentennial of ‘steam navigation’ (vapeur is French for steam). The first successful steamboat was invented by the nobleman Marquis de Jouffroy.
Here’s a blurb from WIRED magazine about the cutting edge steam boat technology of that time : ‘The Pyroscaphe (Greek for ‘fire boat’) steamed upstream at 6 mph without a sail, and the crowds cheered this technological marvel. But after 15 minutes, the boat began to break up under the pounding of the engine. De Jouffroy quickly and cannily steered the boat ashore, and then bowed to the cheering multitudes’.
This gleaming low-slung machine that I spotted here on Republican St and 15th Ave may look as if it is about to vroom across the intersection – but it actually made no sound as it accelerated forward and turned left.
It is BMW’s plug-in hybrid sports car made from carbon fiber and aluminum, the i8. Tesla owners can rightfully point out their cars are completely electric .. but it’s a bit of an apples-and-oranges comparison. The i8 is shaped like a supercar. I see a reviewer reports that the seats are so low that you ‘roll’ out of it after nudging the butterfly doors up and away from you.
The BMW i8 is a plug-in hybrid sports car made from carbon fiber and aluminum. You’re going to need to part with at least $135k to buy this machine. BMW calls the color ‘protonic blue metallic’.
Alright! So I sprung for the iPad Air, since my iPad 2 was getting a little long in the tooth. (Apparently it is ‘Apple upgrade week for me’, since my iPhone 5s is waiting at the office for me to get picked up. I will do that on Monday).
Setting up the new iPad took a little bit of time, since I had to fix my music library on the PC that I synch to. (It’s a long story; some of the music files did not get transferred over to my new PC that I upgraded to earlier this year, and I had to manually import the 50 or so music files into the iTunes library one CD at a time. Only my iTunes music purchases were on the Apple cloud, and that’s still only about 5% of my music collection).
So what do I use my iPad for – now that I have had one for two years? Check out my punch list below. The iPad has its place, but I have an iPhone, and my 15 inch notebook computer from work, almost always with me to use as well. (Whatever happened to the idea that we will all have one and only one device for everything? My answer : Evolution and reality. A big screen is needed for maps and for reading, and a proper keyboard is needed for typing).
What I use my iPad for
> Read digital subscriptions for TIME magazine, Bloomberg Business Week and New York Times (more and more; I still get paper copies in the mailbox but I am about to cancel the paper copies completely)
> Read Twitter’s news feed (as opposed to e-mail, which I read mostly on my phone, and respond to mostly with my notebook computer)
> Do not read books on the iPad (prefer my books in paper mode!)
> Do not take pictures with the iPad (use my phone or full-fledged digital camera)
> Play Scrabble and SpellTower (and really nothing else at this point, so no Angry Birds or Candy Crush)
> Listen to music (on the airplane; as opposed to listening to music on my phone)
> Look at pictures in my synched photo albums (occasionally)
> Watch YouTube videos
> Do not watch movies on it yet (movies bought from the iTunes store, that is .. at home my whole movie collection is on DVD and Blu-ray. I have stopped buying movies on those formats since the whole disk format way of dealing with movies is rapidly changing to on-line streaming and downloading content – similar to what has been under way with music for many years now)
> Surf the web with Google Chrome
> Use various other really cool little apps, among my favorites is Google Translate (and I’m trying to figure out how to best use EverNote for reminders and notes)
The new iPad Air is a little thinner, a little smaller, and somewhat lighter than the previous iPads. The iPad with the cover on the left is my iPad 2 from 2011; the one on the right is the new iPad Air. I got the black and ‘Space Grey’ (instead of white and silver), 128 Gb, Wi-fi Only (no cellular built in) model. I left the keyboard option behind as well. I have my 15 inch notebook computer from work almost always with me for situations where a lot of typing is required).
I’m making this post from my cell phone. The Internet has been down here the last two days. aargh. It’s a DSL connection. The ISP says it’s the phone company, and we have already established that the addition of two iPads, two iPhones and two notebook computers to the wifi router is actually NOT the problem!
