pretty, yes…

…but it’s a bear when you wake up a MacBook Pro from sleep only to encounter this. Can’t wait for the next OS update.

questions about composing from james combs

The composer James Combs shot me an e-mail yesterday asking some interesting questions, such as when did I start composing, how do I find the time (I don’t—it finds me), etc. and he was kind enough to post it on his blog. James is based in Seattle, and has also done a nice interview with my friend Steve Layton. Anyway, James asks some very good and difficult questions, and I’m not sure I had the best answers for them. One question he didn’t ask, and I’m glad he didn’t, is why did I start composing in the first place? I definitely don’t have any good answer for that one, and suspect most of us don’t have any clue why we developed this compulsion.

James gets it. His music, which one can find on his MySpace page is really nice stuff, and one of the valuable attributes of the Web is its ability to enable fellow travelers to find one another’s work. There is no way that James or anyone else in the new music community would likely have found my music without the Internet, and vice-versa. Makes me wonder if the music of Ives or Scelsi or Nancarrow might have received earlier and more widespread listeners had the Internet existed in their eras.

blogging on an iphone

I was bummed to find that the content field in WordPress doesn’t work with an iPhone. That is, I wasn’t able to type in the content field. But I just tried switching to entering text as plain HTML, and that works, since this is how I’m blogging right now. Which I great because it means I can blog more often, assuming I have anything to blog about.

Off to the ACOG meeting in New Orleans tomorrow for a couple of days. Should be interesting.

jailbreaking the iPhone

Once I got my iPhone, I really wanted to add some specific apps to it. On my BlackBerry, I had a Twitter client (TwitterBerry) and a mobile version of Newsgator, so that I could read my RSS newsfeeds and have them sync with NetNewsWire. Both applications were suboptimal, but they worked well enough that I got used to the idea of having quick access to Twitter and RSS feeds on my mobile device. 

So why not with an iPhone?

For most of the past two weeks, I was using Safari to enter and read Twitter microblog posts and my Newsgator RSS feeds. Not optimal, since Newsgator in particular is slow on an EDGE connection. 

My ex-PC friend, who is now a Mac zealot (go figure), started texting my iPhone nonstop to urge me to jailbreak my phone to be able to download and install a variety of applications. With pressure like that, I gave in and downloaded ziphone, which is really simple to use. And it works. In less than a minute, my phone was jailbreaked so that I could now install applications on my iPhone. I should mention that jailbreaking is not the same as unlocking the iPhone. The former is reversible with a software restore in iTunes and does not open the iPhone to multiple wireless carriers. “Unlocking” means that one will then be able to use the iPhone with T-Mobile rather than AT&T, and as such, the visual voicemail feature would no longer exist (since it is tied into AT&T). It is also apparently illegal (my ex-PC friend is an attorney and noted this to me in passing). 

So I now have the mobile Twitter client on my iPhone as well as a nice camera app that enables the iPhone camera to zoom. I still don’t have a Newsgator client, since the mobile version of Newsgator requires Java, which is not supported on the iPhone. I’m hoping Newsgator gets an iPhone client out soon, perhaps through the SDK. ePocrates is also probably going to come out with an iPhone version of its medication database, which would be pretty cool, although I rarely use ePocrates these days (at one time, it was an essential tool on my Handspring Visor Prism). 

So jailbreaking the iPhone is easy, fast and so far, pretty safe to do. And it opens the iPhone up to a lot of possibilities that are not present in a non-jailbroken iPhone. Glad I listened to the text message spam I was getting.

what’s up with the blog?

I haven’t posted in a bit, but not because nothing’s going on. It’s just that I’ve been very busy, and very very happy, with the new job in California, and that hasn’t left me much free time except to occasionally use Twitter here and there. But don’t worry—the blog isn’t dead, just taking a very short hiatus. If I could type into this field using WordPress on my iPhone, I’d be blogging more often, but it isn’t compatible at this time. So stay tuned…

don’t let me down, pennsylvania

For the record, I filed my absentee ballot in person last week in Norristown, PA.

Arielle did a nice job with her chalk art:

composing on the road

Sitting here in a hotel room near the Stanford campus with a new M-Audio 88-key MIDI controller. It’s not the KS-32, but then again, it’s half the weight, USB-powered, and at least all the keys work (unlike the aging KS-32…).

i’ve joined the iPhone generation

Along with opting for the new MacBook Pro, I had a choice at my new job with regard to smartphones. I’ve used a BlackBerry for several years now and while they have their quirks, appreciate the smart way it handles e-mail, the ability to access a clipboard for copying, cutting and pasting text, and its inclusion of autotext (I’m addicted to having abbreviations autoexpand to save me on typing things out in their entirety). My last BlackBerry was great in terms of downloading various applications, such as a NewsGator mobile client for RSS feeds and a Twitter client.

Everything I just mentioned is not currently possible with an iPhone, so why did I opt for one over a BlackBerry? Aside from the fact that my daughter Arielle would have killed for passing up an iPhone, I thought the iPhone long-term is just a better smartphone. And I think I’m correct. Surfing the Web is a much nicer experience on an iPhone than on a BlackBerry. It also has a camera, which most BlackBerries don’t, and syncs very well with my MacBook Pro. I did manage to keep my BlackBerry in sync before, but only by using third-party software and it was quirky at times. I have all my bookmarks handy, as well as my iPhoto libraries, MP3 files, etc. In fact, the only thing that I haven’t been able to sync are my Entourage notes, since the iPhone uses a different Notes system that doesn’t sync with Entourage.

At the same time, there is room for improvement. Aside from the obvious things like slow Web speeds when using AT&T’s EDGE network (which is what I used on the BlackBerry, but since many Web sites were optimized for the device, it didn’t seem as slow), I miss having autotext and clipboard functions. And it would be great to be able to have RSS and Twitter clients—hopefully that will be remedied soon with the SDK. I also wish I could be typing this blog on the iPhone rather than my MBP, but it turns out that the iPhone doesn’t seem to want to recognize the text field I’m typing in as a text field, which is weird since the iPhone’s browser is essentially the same one I’m using right now on my laptop.

Despite a few shortcomings, I’m sold on the iPhone, and am even wondering why I put up with a BlackBerry for four years or so.

various stuff

• Exciting news: Linda Wertheimer of NPR was at our house tonight to interview about nine local Democratic women, including Debbie, in order to get a sense of whom they’re supporting in next week’s primary and how they came to the decision. It was just good fortune that this came about, and the group was more or less split 50/50 Obama/Hillary. The interview will be broadcast tomorrow morning (Weds) on NPR’s Morning Edition. It will also be on NPR.org. I’m really proud of Debbie for participating in this. UPDATE: the link to the broadcast on NPR is here.
• I turned in my absentee ballot early last week in Norristown, PA. I didn’t want to take any chances with the mail.
• I’ve spent several hours between last night and today trying to get a new AirPort Express to extend my wireless network in concert with my old AirPort Express and a Verizon-supplied Westell wireless router (that does not support WDS, although that shouldn’t matter). I’m giving up for now—unless one or both APX’s are wired to either my computer or the Westell router, they’re not visible to the network or to Apple’s AirPort Utility. I’ve configured the new APX to serve as a WDS main base station and the old one to serve as a WDS remote, while the new APX is also wired to the Westell router. However, neither APX can pick up an IP address via DHCP from the Westell router unless hard wired to the router. My next step: adding a regular router between the Westell and the APX’s so that hopefully I can assign IP addresses. Sheesh—I thought this was all supposed to be easy!
• The new MBP has at times manifested one of the graphics glitches that have finally been admitted to by Apple just the other day. If the MBP is not connected to a power source or USB mouse and I use the trackpad to scroll a page in Safari, I get a lot of garbled text. If I use the page down or arrow keys or just hit the space bar to advance the page, this problem generally doesn’t happen. Restarting takes care of it for awhile, but then it returns. Hopefully this will be fixed with 10.5.3, but we’ll see.
• Liking the Finder in Leopard, but I do miss some things from PathFinder, like tabbed browsing. The problem is that I’m finding PF to be somewhat unstable and unpredictable in 10.5.2, as have others.
• Weird glitch today—went to back up my entire iTunes library to DVDs (which I’ve done before on my iBook G4 at least twice just fine) and on two attempts, iTunes 7.6.2 would crash when initiallizing the third disc. Not the first or second, which burned fine. But the third, and this was a reproducible crash. I’m going to try this on my iBook tomorrow. 
• Getting psyched for next week’s start date for my new job in the Bay Area (or is Redwood City just considered the Peninsula and not the Bay Area? I’ll have to figure this one out). Just ordered an M-Audio Keystation 88es from Sweetwater Sound so that I can have an inexpensive 88-key keyboard controller with me for evenings and early mornings. I figure this way I can get a bunch of things done on the music front while in CA and use my time on the East Coast exclusively for work and family. I might actually be more productive with composition this way…
• Oh, and I’m going to be a volunteer ob/gyn in Tanzania this summer. More details to come.

new macbook pro

To be perfectly honest, I’ve never purchased a top-of-the-line Mac laptop. My first Mac laptop was an end-of-life’d PowerBook 520c I got through a university discount. Let’s see—33 MHz, 250 MB hard drive and with the expensive RAM upgrade I bought, it went from 4 MB to a whopping 12 MB of RAM. I should also mention its 9.5” passive matrix color screen and its 28k modem. Yes, those were the days.

I finally was able to get a PowerBook G3 (Wall Street model), which I believe was 256 MHz (or was it 128?), and I maxed out the RAM to 40 MB or so. This was again not the high-end laptop from Apple, but it was more than good enough. Since then, I have had two iBooks, one G3 and a G4, figuring that it wasn’t worth the price differential to get a PowerBook, just as I once looked at my first PowerBook’s crappy passive matrix screen and envisioned five $100 bills next to it, and determined that the $500 looked better than the difference between an active matrix and a passive matrix laptop screen.

I was provided with a MacBook Pro for my forthcoming new job, and it’s incredible to finally have the best tools available for work. It’s the 2.5 GHz dual-core model with half a GB of graphical memory on a separate chip and 2 GB of RAM. The hard drive is 250 GB in size, which is great since my puny 80 GB iBook’s hard disk was nearly full. While I had a weird glitch with the MIgration Assistant right at the end of transferring stuff from my iBook G4 (each time, with less than a minute to go, the Assistant would lose its FireWire connection with the iBook and the iBook was frozen, so some apps didn’t transfer over), it’s been flawless since. I had to re-input my Keynote 3 and Reason 4.0 serial numbers and for some reason I have no printers anymore, but that’s it for problems I’ve found. 

It’s an amazing, incredibly fast laptop. The LED display is very sharp, and an ambient light sensor adjusts brightness based on the surrounding lighting. The keys also light up in low-light conditions, which still amazes my daughter Arielle. And it comes with OS 10.5.2, which so far seems to be working just fine for me. And the trackpad does multi-touch, like the iPhone. In all, it has been a pretty painless update, although a bit more intensive than the last time I used the Migration Assistant to go from the iBook G3 to the G4. It’s just nice to finally have the best toys tools at my disposal.