Kookaburra

Golden Age part 56734

Off to the footy - go tigers - with Ms 12. "how about you bring a book?"
" nah"

20 minutes later on train and boredom sets in. I fish out Kindle, turn on wireless and buy "dragon academy" for her on Amazon. 60 secs later and she's busy getting into the new book.

It's a golden age. But fear I won't see my Kindle for a while - still can read books on iPad instead.

To cap it off this blog post is from iPhone on the go.

iPad, eternal youth and the death of newspapers

After some contemplation my take on the iPad is that it's like a sportscar - nobody needs a sports car but I'd love one. I can't stomach the thought of sinking big dollars into one of Stuggart's finest (how is it that a design launched in 1963 can keep being 'refreshed' and maintaining its sense of eternal youth - I am a 1964 model and I'm well past looking youthful - I digress ... hmm new family motto, should it displace 'death before disco?") 

Back to the iPad - yes I will buy one, because I want one and thanks to the wisdom and smarts of Apple the price is very keen and affordable. (unlike their arrogance and stupidity in the late 80s when they insisted on selling a Mac for $7K against IBM branded PCs for $4.5K - they learnt that lesson when Windows 3.1 proved to be a game changer).

The iPad is not flawless and it won't do everything that everyone wants - what device does? But as a media viewer it delivers.

I've been an iPhone user for about 18 months now (on my second - the first one didn't swim). I was sceptical when I was issued one by my employer (I actually needed a bit of encouragement). Now I am hooked and would feel lost without it (new TomTom app helps a great deal with the not getting lost part - again not perfect but smarter than a Melways - our local street directory).

I do couchsurf using the iPhone on WiFi - to check my email, to get the backstory on characters or shows on TV, or pursue infoquests while also keeping one eye on TV. Rarely is there TV content which is sufficiently gripping to hold 100% of my attention - Top Gear and Blood in the Wire are two that do.

With an iPad I'd couchsurf more effectively on a much larger screen, so that alone is attractive.

I do like to think of myself as a rational consumer (who am I kidding - we're all hostage to our emotions) so to maintain that delusion I've set out below some costs of iPad vs traditional media.

Paper Media

The Age (Melbourne) - 7days/week - $416
The Australian Financial Review - 6 days/week - $899
Business Review Weekly - weekly - $235

Total cost per year = $1550

I'd be well informed but really would be drowning in paper and info (too much info on too many stories I don't necessarily need to know about).

Digital Media

iPad cost - ~A$600 861(Apple haven't published prices but this a guesstimate based on the 37% price difference between iPod Touch 64GB in US vs Australia)
BusinessSpectator.com.au - free
Wikipedia - free
Eureka Report $330
ISP 5GB Wireless data plan $40/month

Total cost per year (assuming iPad 3G life of 3 years) = $1100

Clearly this is biased to how I see the news and reflects my interest - your own comparison will be different. I prefer the smarts of Eureka Report than having to sort the signal from the noise using a traditional finance paper like the Australian Financial Review. We're not quite at the Information Agent stage but The Eureka Report provide a great service in boiling down to just the key info that independent investors are interested in.

In my view I will have a better, more current, interactive news and info experience via iPad than relying on paper.

I don't want The Age to fail - it is a venerable institution which still delivers quality journalism but their 'product' doesn't work for me, and I won't for the sake of tradition just subscribe.

The IPad is fully costed with mobile data access such as the one offered by Internode as a SIM for their recently launched MiFi. I won't need this as I will happily use my WiFi network at home (a cost I am already incurring) but for a daily commuter the data access makes sense. Now you can read on the train to/from work without the broadsheet shuffle (folding a broadsheet newspaper for efficient reading on the train will soon be a lost skill)

So there you have it - a rational argument for buying an iPad - for $305/year you can subscribe to The Age (Mon-Fri) to enjoy on the train/tram/bus to work. OR for ~$770/year (iPad with 3G over 3 years + $40/month mobile data plan) you can enjoy the entire World Wide Web (minus the bits that need Flash) on your daily commute. You may even manage to smite some of your email overload to boot. Yes the iPad combo is over twice the price of The Age but it's infinitely more useful and delivers more current content.

Game over for printed newspapers.  A win for the iPad concept - Apple will certainly be a leader in this space but expect to see some fast followers and innovators who will give Apple a run for their money. I just hope in this transition we don't lose quality journalism - the online publishing house behind Business Spectator and Eureka Report (and Crikey) are showing quality journalism can thrive online.

PS In my exuberance I neglected to choose the price of the 3G enabled model - now corrected.

Summer time ... and time for reading

Summer time and the living is easy ... good times with family and chance to whittle down my reading backlog.

Polished off some lightweight thrillers - (listed on my GoodReads account - http://www.goodreads.com/user/show/2941194-tony ) 

• The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo - a good new variant on the crime thriller formula (OK I know I am late to this party buy it is a good read)
• Beneath The Bleeding - Val McDermid - I do enjoy her writing -> she created the script/character for TV show "Wire in the blood"
• Doors Open - Ian Rankin - creator of Rebus, the Glaswegian dour detective but this is not a Rebus novel

In 2009 I read more books than I have for many years, helped by my 3 months long service leave.

Great 'reads' for 2009 in my view were

Breath by Tim Winton - listened as an audio book when I first returned to Oz from our 12 weeks in Europe. It was so Aussie in its setting and reading that it was a great welcome home. Also a great foil for jetlag.

Juliet Naked by Nick Hornby - a mix of middle age characters and music interacting initially over the net (as musician and music fans) and then in person. A great exploration of life in these online days.

These were books that did make you think and reflect on a life stage - adolescence for Breath and middle-age for Juliet Naked. The audio books are quite a bit more expensive but I can enjoy them while doing something else - driving the car (played from iPhone through Bluetooth speaker) or weeding the garden or working out at the gym (although I prefer music for that)

I enjoyed the latest in the James Bond franchise, Devil May Care by Sebastian Faulks - a faithful return to the style of Fleming's writing and setting in the 1960. I find it quite jarring that at virtually every pause a character lights a cigarette.

Dan Brown (Lost Symbol) and Wilbur Smith (Assegai) delivered to their respective formulas without any real surprises.

Now for my best of non-fiction

Queen Bees and Wannabes - an insightful look into the world of 'girls' and how they interact as they grow up. Some real insights in here for parents. Still working my way through it.

Born to Run - a great read for how the author goes from asking his doctors "Why does it hurt when I run?" to finding a remote tribe in Mexico who run their entire lives and who don't suffer for their running. It's a rollicking yarn and delivers some good insights. Humans evolved and succeeded because our bodies are optimised for running. You need to get the running style right and don't wear excessively padded shoes.

This has lead me to be reading my current two books of interest. "Dr. Nicholas Romanov's Pose Method of Running" and "Chi Running" - now all I need to do it get out there running again.

My fitness routines were inspired by "40 Days as a City Caveman" and my personal finances are now in better shape thanks to "Debtman Walking" (the author Bruce Brammall is now my financial adviser)

My Kindle is working OK for me but I have a backlog of paperbooks and I still keep buying new ones on paper where I think I'd like to be able to share them with others. For those books that have diagrams eg The Four Hour Work Week, the Kindle doesn't deliver an easy to read/use format. Otherwise I am happy with my Kindle but frustrated that some books aren't available for it.

Loving access to www.booko.com.au for finding the book you want at the best price. I got a lot more books for my bucks thanks to Booko.

Here's to a great 2010 and some more stimulating reading. (although there's already a ton tonne of 'work' to be done first @office and @home)

Cheap books for Oz? Buy them in UK!

Stumbled across http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/ - a UK based bookseller who offers 'free shipping worldwide'.

Once you take postage out of the equation (which they do) then I still prefer a paperback to an ebook (though ebooks also have their advantages)

Sampled a few book prices vs Dymocks (as they are one of the leading Aussie booksellers) and Seekbooks.com.au. In the case of Dymocks you need to add cost of time and fuel needed to get to a store. For Seekbooks.com.au you still need to add postage costs.

Recent bestsellers, if discounted at Dymocks are about line ball but still worth testing the difference on.

Here's some that show the stark difference

Ian Rankin's Doors Open - published 6 Aug 2009 paperback
GBP7.19 A$12.72 from Book Depository in UK
A$22.99 from Dymocks
A$20.69 from Seekbooks.com.au

Val McDermid - Beneath the Bleeding
GBP6.29 A$11.13 from Book Depository in UK
A$19.99 from Dymocks
A$17.99 from Seekbooks.com.au

Tim Winton's Breath - paperback
GBP7.19 A$12.72 from Book Depository in UK
A$24.95 from Dymocks
A$22.46 from Seekbooks.com.au

The last one is crazy - you can buy an Australian author's book in the UK and ship it to Australia cheaper than you can buy it from a local bookshop. Even the hardback version from UK is cheaper than the Australian sourced hardback.

I haven't used Book Despository to date but I will be placing my first order ASAP.

Works really well at moment given strength of A$ vs GBP but there is enough margin in there that it will still make sense when/if A$ weakens.

Update: Should have found booko.com.au first - it makes the comparison
shopping for books across multiple sites really easy and automatically
converts back to A$. I can myself buying more books - but what about
the great pile of unread ones to tackle first. Need more hours in the
day.

Dave Barry - what unites humanity

"The only thing that unites humanity is, deep down, we all think we're better than average drivers."
American writer Dave Barry, quoted on ABC's Enough Rope

Slashdot | Reminding Customers Patented by Amazon

Slashdot | Reminding Customers Patented by Amazon:

"When your little Hogwart checks out the latest Harry Potter book at Amazon, he or she may be reminded that they've already ordered the book. It's all part of CEO Jeff Bezos latest patent for the Contextual presentation of information about related orders during browsing of an electronic catalog, which also covers warning customers about drug interactions ('you previously purchased Drug ABC'). The USPTO allowed the patent after four years and five rejections."

You can't blame Amazon from trying hard to grab what it can. It is the system (US Patent and Trademark Office) which is screwy.

This is the same sort of stuff that Microsoft's 'Clippy' offers - "It looks like you are writing a letter...". Yet again Amazon gain a monopoly on some relatively obvious aspect of online selling. Now the burden shifts to everyone else - you need to hire a phalanx of your own lawyers to ensure you don't infringe on Amazon's patents. It's probably one of the reasons why Australian online bookstores are lame compared to Amazon.

Read the slashdot thread. This is lunacy.

Handwriting tips

On the basis that it's never too late to improve here are some handwriting tips. My own handwriting is so bad that I learnt to type (well sort of) so I could actually get my work marked at Uni. Have I improved? Well it doesn't matter so much as I mainly type these days but there is still something deliciously tactile when putting pen to paper.

GBS on the unreasonable man

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the conditions that surround him... The unreasonable man adapts surrounding conditions to himself... All progress depends on the unreasonable man." George Bernard Shaw

The quote is worth dwelling on, as is this site. www.unreasonableman.net

Wired News: Monster Fueled by Caffeine

Delicious Monster is the Mac software company behind the hit Delicious Library, a program for cataloging collections of books, movies and games. The software is selling like hot cakes and has garnered rave reviews and awards, yet the company's headquarters is a Seattle coffee house ... its four main employees meet every day at the popular Zoka coffee shop in Seattle's university district. (full article at Wired News)

Maybe perhaps one day I will deploy Delicious Library -- need to unpack 20+ boxes of books first.

Malcolm Gladwell's new book 'Blink'

Malcolm Gladwell, the author of 'The Tipping Point' has new book out - 'Blink'. This one is going on my must read list.

This is the author introducing the book on his website - gladwell.com:

What is "Blink" about?

It's a book about rapid cognition, about the kind of thinking that happens in a blink of an eye. When you meet someone for the first time, or walk into a house you are thinking of buying, or read the first few sentences of a book, your mind takes about two seconds to jump to a series of conclusions. Well, "Blink" is a book about those two seconds, because I think those instant conclusions that we reach are really powerful and really important and, occasionally, really good.

You could also say that it's a book about intuition, except that I don't like that word. In fact it never appears in "Blink." Intuition strikes me as a concept we use to describe emotional reactions, gut feelings--thoughts and impressions that don't' seem entirely rational. But I think that what goes on in that first two seconds is perfectly rational. It's thinking--its just thinking that moves a little faster and operates a little more mysteriously than the kind of deliberate, conscious decision-making that we usually associate with "thinking." In "Blink" I'm trying to understand those two seconds. What is going on in inside our heads when we engage in rapid cognition? When are snap judgments good and when are they not? What kinds of things can we do to make our powers of rapid cognition better?