Why I'm waiting to buy an iPad

The gadget world went wild this past weekend with the release of Apple’s iPad, a tablet computer that resembles an oversized iPhone. Early estimates put first-day sales at 700,000, with more in inventory awaiting eager buyers at Apple stores everywhere.

I wasn’t among the eager ones; I steered clear of the lines and crowds at St. Louis-area retailers with remarkable self-control. Even now, after reading a couple dozen reviews and first-impressions of the device, my often twitchy gadget-loving fingers are still, my heart beats at a regular rhythm and I feel strangely calm for one who took enormous pride in muscling through like-minded throngs to snatch up the latest must-have, trend-setting, life-altering technology.

My uncommon mood could be a sign of aging. I look at my gray hairs and wonder how many were due to past gadget quests (A couple of scars certainly were). I peer through the stacks of dusty high-tech toys in my house and try hard to remember which ones evoked passion and which ones I merely liked and soon cast aside like an overeager kid on Christmas morning.

Or, maybe my calm results from the muscle relaxant I’m taking to ease a sore back (Here, I pause to praise the pharmaceutical industry for assisting me more than any gadget).

Probably both factors are at play.

However, one thing is certain: I have the wisdom of experience, and I point to those stacks of dusty gadgetry as proof.

Much of the menagerie consists of first versions and barely tested concepts launched with more hype than common sense. Some came from companies that vanished along with the hope their devices inspired. Some are third and fourth and sixth editions of good ideas that have not improved by degrees to remain interesting or relevant. Some are simply more strange than useful (Example: a pen-shaped document scanner that even James Bond wouldn’t rely on for important work.)

Yes, gadgets come and go and change, much like fashion. The ones that stay with us though are of prescient design, possess form and function in equal parts, lack quirkiness as a selling point. They are devices with which we need only our hands, and not our brains, to operate.

This is why Apple succeeds year after year with each new idea. The digital music player and mobile phone were time-worn ideas when Apple revealed the iPod and iPhone. So, too, is the tablet computer. Yet Apple’s products become market standards in spite of their hype. They’re monuments to technical simplicity — typical users need not rely on a manual to discern how they’re used; they just press that one round button at the bottom.

But that’s not enough to get me in the door of an Apple store lately. I already expect Apple’s products to be intuitive; what I need now is dependability. I now require some assurance that my first visit to an Apple store, either in person or online, will not lead to several others involving service or repairs.

In over a quarter century of using Apple products, I have taken five such trips, far fewer than with less complicated equipment such as clothes washers and microwave ovens, to be sure, but a majority of the trips coming within the past two years to try resurrecting dead iPods and laptops.

Apple service personnel explained away those equipment failures as particular to the model I owned.

“I’m sorry Mr. Sheets, but we’ve had trouble with these lately,” an in-store “genius” at Apple’s Genius Bar in West County said of my unresponsive MacBook last summer. “All I can tell you is, repairing it will cost a lot more than replacing it.”

Naturally, I heard this about a week after the warranty ran out.

So now, I watch the crowds rush in and out of Apple’s stores with iPads and I skim through reams of user feedback generated through the first 48 hours of our new iPad-infused existence, and I’m waiting for the first complaints to surface. None may arise, but I’m not so sanguine about that. (Apple already warned about a potential problem with excessive battery drain and promised replacement iPads to anyone whose new toy suffered from it).

Important to me at this point however is my understanding, accumulated through years of tech troubleshooting and related disappointment, that the first iteration of any idea often isn’t the best. The marketplace always sifts out surprise, and Apple will respond as always with an improved device that not only addresses current consumer complaints, but also major bugs that even Apple’s accomplished brain trust could not foresee.

Thus, six to nine months from now, the iPad finally will have become the device everyone wishes it was from Day One and truly be worth the $500 to $830 Apple expect you to shell out for it.

Besides, I appreciate all the geniuses at Apple and all the work they do. I just prefer not needing to deal with them.

Happy birthday, dot-com

Happy birthday, dot-com

I missed an opportunity to write a timely commentary on this, but it's still worth noting:

Three Letters and a Punctuation Mark That Changed the World

Sony pulls a Toyota

You may remember that Sony's PlayStation Network took a powder late last month.

For more than a day, the network and some games relying on it were unplayable on PlayStation 3s sold before last September, when the new slimmer systems debuted. The problem went away, the firestorm of criticism died down and Sony attributed the problem to a software "bug" that tricked system clocks into resetting a decade late.

Nice, but I'm inclined to think the term "bug" is generous to a fault. It suggests the software somehow tripped over its own shoelaces, when in fact software doesn't trip by itself -- if it falls, it's because people did something to push it. And in this case, those who did the pushing probably were inattentive programmers.

The network shutdown resulted when system clocks misinterpreted "March 1" as "Feb. 29," a date not on any calendar this year, and when the clocks couldn't find that date they kicked over to a default setting, Jan. 1, 2000. This is like a Y2K joke only Rip Van Winkle could appreciate.

As everyone lumped into the broad category between Harvard grads and Oprah watchers should know already, Feb. 29 shows up only on calendars for leap years, those quadrennial events that make us think we're getting more bang for our year.

Feb. 29 is in reality like that free cup of coffee you get after being overcharged for the three cups you bought before it.

Sony, in effect, spilled that cup and burned everyone at PSN, maybe burned their reputation a bit as well. Because no matter what excuse Sony offers, the fault lies with the dunderhead(s) who programmed a leap day to appear where none should.

That nobody thought during the code-writing process to consult a cheap calendar, or one that was turned to 2010, or ask someone nearby who might have a clue about when leap days appear -- well, that just makes Sony look almost as clueless as Toyota.

Furry kids, with benefits

These are my kids.

That's Augie on the left, Missy on the right. They're dachshunds rescued from abuse and neglect. As you can see, both are doing fine right now.

I call them "kids" because, against all good sense and rational behavior, my wife and I treat them like they're human children, not like dogs. I suppose if we had children already, the dogs would be just dogs.

So I guess it's a good thing we don't have children; they might wind up competing for our affection with the dogs.

I've heard though that this tends to be normal behavior among humans because dogs and other pets satisfy a paternal or maternal instinct in all of us. But dogs respond to our overtures better than just about any other animal, hence the special relationship all dogs seem to have with humans.

That special relationship elevates to another level regarding discard dogs, which are the kinds of dogs my wife and I prefer to have. These are the animals who suffered in some way by dint of being born into cruel circumstances or merely falling into them ... such as when owners feel their dogs are no longer cute or cuddly, or are bored with them, or perhaps more tragically are unable to care for them due to economic concerns.

The dogs we've acquired (four, over the past decade) all have suffered from one or more of these things. Augie, for example, was rescued from a puppy mill where the workers were indifferent to her health; she lost all her teeth and contracted a virus that destroyed her hearing. Missy, on the other hand, spent her first year cooped up in a cage that was too small for her; her ears have tears from banging the sides of the cage when she shook herself.

Our previous dogs, Tara and Lindy, who have since died, were discards, too. My wife and I like to think they passed away happy and comforted knowing their last years were much better than their first ones.

We think this way because we're not convinced that dogs were born to suffer. They enter the world as meek and unaware as humans do, and they're just as hungry for affection. Unlike humans however, dogs remain loyal to the source of affection, and they're intensely loyal to anyone who relieves them of agony.

Augie and Missy have shown us as much. Tara and Lindy did, too. And as long as that continues to happen, my wife and I will continue to try giving abandoned or abused dogs a better life.

Italian court makes Internet lovers nervous

Internet addicts take note - Italy may have mussed your mojo.

A legal ruling last week from the land of Leonardo da Vinci has instilled doubt about the future of openness on the always open Internet, and that doubt maay trickle over into gamers' goings-on.

At issue was whether Web search giant Google impinged on the privacy of an autistic Italian boy in 2006 by posting a video of him being beaten by bullies at school. The film clip appeared on Google Video and was viewed thousands of times before it was pulled down and the boy's father pressed the case that posting the clip violated Italy's privacy protection laws.

An Italian court agreed Wednesday and sentenced three Google executives - chief legal officer David Drummond, global privacy counsel Peter Fleischer and former chief financial officer George Reyes, none of whom were involved in posting the video clip - in absentia for the violation, ruling that Google was responsible for upholding Italy's law and should have pulled down the video in a timely manner.

The executives will not serve time; their sentences were suspended. The ruling, however, hangs over the Internet like a sword of Damocles. In effect, it demands everyone who posts content online to take responsibility for that content regardless of the content's origin.

This threatens to be a particularly sticky wicket for content aggregators such as Google and Yahoo and YouTube, whose main task has been posting instead of policing. Social and gaming networks, too, would suffer if it means that not only sites like Facebook and services like PlayStation Home, but also the users of such sites and networks are held legally responsible for whatever they contribute.

Advocates of Internet freedom lament the ruling's potential chilling effect and parrot Google's statement that if left to stand "the Web as we know it would cease to exist." On the other hand, Italy is said to have a low rate of Internet commerce compared to the rest of Europe and its government has been debating various legislation to assert more control over Italians' Web usage.

Furthermore, the European Union, of which Italy is a part, asserts through its own regulations on Internet commerce that content providers should be free from the kind of crushing obligation imposed by the Italian court's ruling; thus, the ruling may conflict with established legal precedent.

In the end, this may be an example of the mouse that roared. The question is, will that roar have an ominous echo.

Workplace anger and Facebook

More frustrating to me than technology failures in the marketplace are people unclear on concepts related to technology and the marketplace.

To wit: A colleague's outburst last week on, of all places, Facebook, after his onerous experience with our employer's productivity software.

Exactly what prickled him wasn't made clear in his post, but his general disparagement rang bells with a few other colleagues, and they therefore felt the need to chime in.

I can guess what happened. You see, our workplace software is, to put it mildly, uncooperative about 2 percent of the time; files are lost or erased, templates must be reloaded time after time, network connections fracture and the servers have a hard time swallowing commands when too many come through the pipe at once. Not to mention that the computer system itself is aging. (What the heck; I mentioned it anyway.)

From this standpoint, anyone unfamiliar with our systems might nod in understanding, as I doubt our issues are either new or unique. 'Tis always thus for people and institutions who expect electrons to maintain a constant charge.

There is, therefore, a certain amount of hair-tugging, fabric-rending, desk-pounding, heart-racing and blue language expected with such matters when said matters arise at or near a project deadline.

What galls me though is not these animated displays in the office (no, that's not right; they do, in fact, gall me), but animated displays artlessly distributed through social networks. In particular: Facebook.

I attribute this distribution to a desire for emotional outreach, a search for understanding among kindred souls who may have stumbled down the same dark path. Basically, these folks are just venting and demand an audience to gage their performances.

But when I next crank up my workplace computer, that venting will not have released whatever silicon-based pressure initiated the trouble. The software will be, as before, balky at times. (Perhaps more so if addressing the users' initial complaints leads to alterations in the software interface that in turn force users to revise their behavior.)

That is, in part, because the venting goes out to people who may understand but cannot fix the problem. The wrong audience is listening.

But the other part is design of the system and the need. Our software was created with one goal, and we are able to achieve that goal adequately. Anything more demands an expenditure the company had neither the time nor inclination to accommodate. Here too, this is nothing new in the American workplace.

In other words, we've got what we've got because it does the job and fell within a specific price range, not because it was apt to coddle its users.

Of course, this doesn't stop people from treating software as a friend, instead of as a tool. As a result, we're hurt when it jilts us.

Whatever subsequent closure we seek, however, cannot be found on Facebook. Or Twitter. Or any of the social networks we use. They become little more than conduits for noise when we try.

So, folks, please just, you know, keep a lid on it. Bite your tongue. Bite someone else's tongue, if you prefer. But refrain from taking a one-step approach to what could be a 12-step problem. And be mindful of your employer's perceptions regarding publicized workplace issues. (Employers do read Facebook, you know.)

Because while you may feel better after venting on Facebook, your boss might feel just the opposite.

Praying for time

Adopt an old dog, one with frailties and potential for chronic illness, and expect to get your heart broken.

I'm feeling the fractures develop now, almost four years after my wife and I took in Lindy (left), a 10-year-old Pomeranian rescued from a puppy mill and offered up for adoption by a group that finds homes for senior dogs, ages 6 and up.

We took Lindy because she was cute, but also out of pity. Her black fur was made ragged by a thyroid condition, and her seven remaining teeth jut from her jaws at oblique angles. Two lower canines curl out over her upper lip, giving her a comical look of perpetual ferocity.

She was little more than a baby factory and treated in ways that are heartbreaking to describe. Adopting her we thought would afford her the comfort and love she probably never had, and sorely deserved.

Given her problems - including brittle bones caused by having too many puppies - we expected to have Lindy maybe two years. As of today, it's past three and a half.

But she may not make it to four. Last week, a chronic cough caused by a heart murmur and related swelling of the pericardium grew much worse, making it more difficult for her to breathe and sometimes even move. The coughs are loud, raspy and deep, and they ripple through her body. Once occasional, now the coughs come in a series lasting a few minutes to almost an hour.

My wife and I lose sleep from the coughing; you can hear them through the house, and they're almost as tough to listen to as they are for a 9-pound dog to have.

The several veterinarians who have examined Lindy are certain this latest convulsing is the inevitable and irreversible next symptom of her condition. (The swelling pericardium is pressing against her windpipe.) Drugs that were prescribed to minimize the swelling have lost their effectiveness. And so, in a short time, this little girl who's always happy, even despite the awful coughs, will lose the shine in her eyes.

Lindy's old and frail, and susceptible to numerous maladies. Yet my wife and I like to think there's a miracle out there looking for someone deserving ... someone small and furry. So we keep hoping Lindy's next cough will be her last, her next pill will be unnecessary, and three and a half years will stretch to four, five or six.

And even if that happens, we'll still think the end has come too soon.


UPDATE: Lindy passed away just after 2 p.m. on Wednesday, Feb. 10. My wife and I were with her when she died peacefully after a long struggle with heart failure. Lindy leaves a huge hole in our home and hearts, but we take comfort in the joy she gave us, and we tried to give in return, in the short time she was a part of our family.