A Whole Lotta Nothing

Ten months with a Nest

With the recent news of a new version of the smart thermostat Nest coming out, I figured I should finally write up what it has been like living with the first version of the product since last November, when mine arrived.

Overall, it's been a great little tool, smart in lots of smart ways and dumb in just a very few and eons ahead of similar products I've used. Back in the early 2000s, I spent some time in my first house trying to automate everything. I used x10 to control my lights and set up schedules to turn lights on and off at certain times and I bought a programmable thermostat in the hopes of not only saving energy but also allowing me to wake up to a pre-warmed house in the winter.

I recall how quickly my adoration with home automation faded when I decided to stay up 15 minutes later than normal only to have the entire downstairs lighting shut off to pitch black per the schedule I created. I also remember spending hours programming the thermostat with complicated weekday versus weekend programs, and how after a couple months I just gave up and used it like a normal thermostat that sat at fixed temperatures.

When I heard about the Nest, I immediately ordered one and patiently waited the months until it arrived. It came with a free professional installation that would be scheduled a couple weeks later, but I decided to try it myself and like my last house it was pretty easy to do and 20 minutes after I started, everything was running and it was downloading software updates from wifi (pictured above).

In use

After about a week of using the thermostat to adjust temps (fun bonus: cranking up the heat on a cold December morning from the comfort of your bed, using the Nest iPhone app), it started to realize our patterns and follow them (I rarely have to run the iPhone app these days). It was a nice change from the hours of programming I did in the past and it just seemed to work for my family, realizing that we woke up around 7am most days, went to sleep around 11pm, and started shutting itself off whenever we were gone for the day. After about a month, I went onto the Nest.com website to check the schedule and it only required a minor amount of tweaking to follow a perfect pattern.

Let me say straight up that the motion sensor in it is pretty amazing. It realizes when no one has been home for a couple hours and sets your thermostat to auto-away mode, saving energy by going to prescribed temp extremes (colder than normal in winter, warmer than normal in summer). I've never had it go to auto-away while I was home working even though it's in a different room. I should also say that if I had a normal office job, the Nest would be doing an even better job. I'm at home about five days a week so it doesn't get tripped into away mode as often as typical houses where most people are gone during the daytime weekday hours.

It's hard to say what the bottom line is on energy savings for me. I don't watch our electric bills super closely and our bill includes charges for water too (which usage fluctuates wildly), making quantifying the post-Nest world a bit tougher, but I do know the system goes into auto-away mode reliably several times a week and it's been great to set the whole system to away mode when we've been on vacation. Having a vacant house heated and air conditioned is a lot like running your lawn sprinklers during a rainstorm, a total waste of money. It's also great to have the iPhone/web connections to control it even though I don't need it very often. I remember bringing up the phone app and taking the house out of away mode at the airport when we landed from a vacation, and arriving to a cool house in the summer an hour later.

About the only downsides are how it sometimes acts a bit too eager to please. You might have a dinner party and turn on the air conditioning a few degrees cooler than normal to keep guests comfortable, and the thermostat is supposed to ignore one-off moments like this, but I found it slightly adjusting itself at odd times that reflected short term changes. This also happened when I left the country for a week while the rest of my family stayed behind, introducing a new schedule where I wasn't home all week in my home office that had to be adjusted later when I went back to my old schedule.

Apart from those minor schedule nits, the Nest has been great, warming the house on winter mornings, shutting down each night about an hour before we typically go to sleep, following our coming and going patterns appropriately and being completely controllable in real time from either the web or our phones (and also by the nice weighty dial on the unit itself) if we need to change things. I won't be buying a new one (for the same reasons Marco states here the software updates make getting a new one unnecessary) but I can wholeheartedly recommend it to all my friends as a neat way to save a bit of energy and turn a dumb appliance like your heating and air conditioning into an automatically configured smart object that works with your own patterns of behavior.

Great iOS software: Pillboxie

I have a simple pharmaceutical regime, but a complicated schedule. Three drugs total, one needs to be taken every morning one hour before I eat, a second immediately after I eat (along wth some allergy meds and vitamins at that time). The third one is trickiest, it has to be right before I go to sleep, but only on Tuesdays and Saturdays.

I've had this schedule since November of 2009, and I did pretty well for the first two years or so. It was ok to forget once in a while for 2 out of the three drugs but a couple years in I started to lower my dosages and I started forgetting at least one a week, then more than once a week. I tried the standard alarms on my iPhone, but they were a bit too invasive (they always went off audibly, usually hours after I took the pill already) and no one likes an alarm at 10pm twice a week when you're starting to go to sleep.

Eventually I found pillboxie. I've been using it for a couple months and it works great. Every morning an hour after I normally take a pill I have it set to remind me with a silent notification on my home screen. I can check off when I remembered to take it, and take it if I forgot. Since I check my phone when I wake up and when I go to sleep, during those once or twice a week times I might forget to take a pill, my phone has a nice notification telling me to and I haven't forgotten a pill since I started using Pillboxie. It's simple and it works, and if you have medications on different timetables and you use an iPhone I wholeheartedly recommend it.

Verizon vs. AT&T iPhones in NW Oregon

A friend asked me to review my switch after 3+ years on AT&T to Verizon with the iPhone 4s. I've been using the Verizon phone for nearly 3 months and I spent all summer sitting next to an intern using the first Verizon 4 iPhone, so I got to use them side by side before switching. Here are my thoughts after a few months of usage:

In general I always have coverage everywhere I've been in Portland and in cities beyond, more so than when I had an AT&T phone in the area. I haven't noticed the reported call sound quality increases (cell phones just generally sound like talking into a tin can and still do) but I do have to say I've never dropped a call since I left AT&T. When I would be driving on the freeway in Portland, my calls on AT&T (through bluetooth, of course) would drop about half the time. It was almost like clockwork when I'd hit the city limits of Portland that my calls would begin to drop on AT&T. That has never happened with Verizon. In nearly three months, I've never gotten a "network busy" error either, which is something that happened a couple times a month on my old AT&T phone.

The only downside I've found is that data is a bit slower. Not super slow and you get used to it really fast and forget about it, but I remember thinking web pages I always accessed on AT&T were loading on Verizon in a few more seconds than usual. I do tons of stuf online with my phone so this can be a dealbreaker for people working 100% online that require the fastest data connection, but I gave up a slight bump in speed for reliable networking. The Verizon phone always seems to have a 3G connection.

There was one other aspect aside that also made me switch and it was the increased coverage that Verizon has over everyone else. I noticed in the coverage maps that Verizon extends a mile or two into the wilderness more than AT&T and every single time I went for a mountain bike (MTB) ride in Oregon (Bend, Dallas, McMinnville, McKenzie River, Mt St Helens, Hagg Lake) my AT&T connection would disappear either in the parking lot or the trailhead. I've taken a couple MTB rides since I switched and on one ride I always had a connection whenever I stopped to check and another I had a connection about 3/4 of the stops (only in a small valley of dense forest was there no connection). This was really important to me since I broke my wrist last year -- I know I'm no longer invincible and if anyone riding with me ever crashed on a MTB ride, normally we'd all be screwed and have to hike out with an injured person. Having some chance of phone service made me feel a bit safer whenever I go off road.

That's about it, increased coverage, calls never drop, but data speeds are a tad slower. The costs are about the same but I have liked switching to Verizon since the local store has a very competent staff that helped me get phones on launch day and have fixed a couple of tiny issues since I got the phones (like changing callerID, etc). The local AT&T store was mostly unhelpful in the three years I would sporadically interact with them.

Health Month (so far)

Health Month is a new game (currently in beta) designed to help you find that ever-elusive motivation that you need to improve your health. 

via healthmonth.com

I've been playing the Health Month beta this month and it's been a great motivator to get out of my office chair and onto my bike and into some running shoes. I set some pretty high goals for myself and have been doing my best to try and hit them. As crazy as it sounds, I actually forced myself to take a long bike ride the other day when I was still tired from the previous day's exercise simply because I was low on "life points" in the game.

I've lost five pounds in two weeks because I set a goal of exercising 5 times a week instead of the typical 1x or 2x per week I've been doing lately. Due to some of the medications I take, I've been gaining about 3-4lbs a month since last December, so having my first significant weight loss has been satisfying and I'm feeling better than before. The game is just enough to motivate me to try a little harder while still being fun.

The site runs as a month-to-month thing, so be sure to sign up so you can try it out in October.

 

Crap I love: The Tiko portable iPhone/iPad holder

Last fall, I bought a Tiko iPhone/iPod holder to prop up my iPhone while playing movies on planes, after hearing about it on Not Martha.

On my way out on the last trip, I decided to throw this barely-larger-than-a-business-card holder in my backpack in case I needed it.

After a cross country trip where I watched about five hours of video on my iPad, I'm happy to report that this designed-for-iPhone stand is barely heavy duty enough to work for holding an iPad on a airplane tray table.

Here's a shot of it holding my iPad on a desk. Best ten bucks I ever spent.

Conan's first roadshow

I was lucky enough to see Conan's tour kickoff earlier this evening in Eugene, Oregon. The night started off with the amazing Reggie Watts doing his mix of live music and comedy for about 40 minutes then after a break, Conan's band played a bit and then the man finally came on.

He hit the stage and got a standing ovation that lasted a good 3-4 minutes. It was a great moment and Conan admitted that in all honesty, the thing he missed most from leaving TV was getting to hear applause.

It was a fun night. Andy Richter was there and they explained why they were doing the show and how it'd work, they did a few bits from the show, and Conan played and sang on several songs. There were video parts to break up the evening featuring goofy bits and characters from the old show. The band Spoon happened to be playing in Eugene that night as well, and somehow they worked it out where the band dropped by and played one song in the middle (and presumably ran across town to their own headlining show soon after). I'm curious if they'll be able to pull off a similar guest musician spot in other towns.

About the only parts of the evening that were less than successful had to do with the music. There was a song where Conan changed the lyrics to basically be begging for a new show for laughs, but since he announced earlier that very day TBS was picking him up for a show in the Fall, the jokes fell a little flat. Half the show seemed to be music, with Conan (kinda sorta) playing guitar over blues and rock classics. He probably played 4-5 songs throughout the night and it started to seem a little self-indulgent by the end, like they could have done half as many songs and just threw a few more bits from the old Late Night or video parts to increase the comedy aspects.

Overall, it was a great night, a celebration of all things Conan, and a very entertaining show.

Four weeks with a Droid (and two weeks with an unlocked Nexus One)

In response to my first few frustrating hours with a Droid, my friend Gina asked if I'd post my thoughts four weeks on, instead of first impressions which can often be deceiving (but amusing -- I encourage others to do it sometime even if half your blog entry ends up bemoaning the difficult packaging to get to the item). Now that I've learned the ins and outs and gotten to kick the tires on Android, the Droid, and a Nexus One, I feel like there is a lot to say about it, especially in comparison to my years on an iPhone and previous to that, a Blackberry.

I'm much less frustrated by Android and the devices it runs on, after tweaking things and getting to know it better. There are a lot of similarities to the iPhone, many places I think it even excels over the iPhone, and quite a few areas that can be improved. In no particular order:

The Good

- Though I didn't like it at first, I've grown to like the desktop metaphor for the Android home screen. Simple shortcuts to just the apps or views of apps that you use the most, it's a great timesaver and once tweaked to my liking, I found I only hit the applications button once every couple days because all the key things are on my desktop.

- The Android 2.1 OS in the Nexus One is brilliant looking and the desktop and apps views are much nicer looking that earlier releases. It's a shame they don't deploy those equally to all Android devices.

- The software keyboard is on par with the iPhone's, though I miss the hidden hold-drag shortcuts (on an iPhone you could hit the 123 button, hold it, and slide over to that one number you needed, when released the keyboard would bounce back to alpha). I love the suggested words showing up above the keypad and I've found it to be a huge timesaver, guessing correctly for what I'm typing over half the time and saving valuable keystrokes.

- The hardware keyboard on the Droid is too small and largely useless to me. The auto-correct and suggested words go away on my Droid when you pop out the slide-out keyboard, even though I type just as many if not more mistakes than the software keyboard. It adds quite a bit of thickness and weight to the Droid, both of which I'd prefer to go without.

- The way Android and Google Chrome on the desktop integrate the search bar and the web address bar into a single UI feature (when every other browser separates them) is pure genius. On my Android phones, I don't even have to recall the full URL of anything, just remember a keyword or two that I know will end up at that site. On the Android, I get location awareness with a phone number, map, and link to driving directions in the Navigation app.

- The Google Navigation app is simply incredible. I bought a TomTom GPS unit for my wife's car a couple years ago and liked it enough to get the TomTom app on my iPhone for driving directions when I travel and rent a car, but I've found the TomTom iPhone app is difficult to input addresses to and has minimal integration with the iPhone's address book (it requires me to confirm every aspect of stored addresses). The Google Navigate app can be launched from addresses found in the Android browser, offers several views of your trip, and it's remarkably easy to enable or disable the voice prompts when driving (every other app and unit buries that several menus deep). It's a pleasure to use and I carry my Droid in my car even though I already have a factory installed navigation system in it.

- Gmail and Google Voice are also killer apps for Android. For people addicted to scanning and archiving items out of their Gmail inbox, the Gmail client is a pleasure. Google Voice is incredible and sorely missed from the iPhone and the stupid iTunes App Store policies that barred it from entry. Google Voice gives you the same sense of freedom and control over your daily interruptions that a DVR attached to a TV does -- once you've experienced it you can never go back.

- The Android ecosystem doesn't require a computer at all. At first I found this slightly frustrating as it takes some tweaking to get music on or off the device, or get movies playing back smoothly, but over time I've come to appreciate this and enjoy it. Having to dock my iPhone to a computer (and wait for it to backup and transfer files when I just want to go out the door with a new podcast on it) is a regular hassle and I can tell the Android OS was designed for people that may very well not even own a desktop or laptop computer. The phone itself is almost as powerful as a laptop. I haven't played with podcasting apps much on Android, but I imagine it must be as easy as it is to update apps and download music from Amazon.

- The form factor of the Nexus One is amazing. Super thin and light, with a huge bright screen. Being that I don't have a SIM card in it, its first charge ran for a week with occasional use over wifi. My Droid feels blocky, heavy, chunky, and barely holds a charge for a 24hr day of use. 

- Verizon on the Droid is a much better phone service than AT&T on the iPhone. I know, totally obvious, but the difference is so great that I'm paying for a second cellphone because AT&T has gotten so bad in the last few months. I live outside of Portland, Oregon, and while 3G and phone service works great in my small town of few iPhone users, the moment I go near the city of Portland I get dropped calls galore and 3G data issues. I've taken to calling friends back on the Verizon Droid often enough that having a backup phone on another network is a necessity.

- I missed multi-touch the first time I used Android, but after a day or two I got used to double-tapping to zoom in apps and dragging with one finger to accomplish the same thing. It probably sucks for games to not have multitouch, but it's fine in apps.

- The notifications bar with pull-down alerts is great for finding out a bunch of information coming from a variety of your apps at once. I wish the iPhone had something like that.

- Being able to "return" any app in the Android Market within 24hrs for a full refund is fantastic.

- Having all your apps, desktop wallpapers, etc. saved on the server side somewhere at Google is a pretty amazing thing. After I popped onto the Nexus One for the first time and inputted my Google details, the phone picked up most of my preferences from my Droid phone. This will make switching phones in the future from one Android device to another much smoother.

- It's clear Android is going to be a popular phone operating system available on pretty much every carrier in the US. Overall, I'd say it's about 80-90% of the way to the kind of experience you get with an iPhone with several things I feel it does better than an iPhone.

Areas for improvement

- The iPhone came from the iPod world so it's an incredible media playback device and the Droid and Nexus One feel like multimedia is just an add-on that isn't central to the device. There's no iTunes to sync with Android (I tried doubletwist and it was buggy) so you either have to buy music directly from the Amazon MP3 store (which I actually prefer to the iTunes store for music even on my Mac desktop due to cheaper songs and no DRM) or you have to navigate mounted USB folders in the file system by hand, which is a chore at best. It took a bit of reading forums and blog posts to figure out the correct Handbrake settings to get a movie to playback smoothly on either Android device, and I had to make a directory called "Video" in the right place and download a playback app from the Android Marketplace to even watch it. The Nexus One has a bigger, brighter screen than any iPhone or iPod I've used so you'd think they'd make media more a focus given the great hardware.

- The Android Market for Apps is good but feels like it could be a lot better. There doesn't seem to be nearly as much curation as the iPhone App Store for making you aware of the best of the best (I had to rely on twitter and blog posts to figure out what to try out). The reviews are listed by the last three reviews first, even if they are a frustrated user (iPhone App Store lists highest rated first, right?) so the reviews are choppy (lots of either 1-star I HATE IT or 5-star AMAZING reviews). There is no "Update all apps" single button to push which gets tiresome as your Android device tells you every few days you need to update four apps by clicking over and over and over.

- The iPhone has only one button, Android has four along the bottom. iPhone puts it on developers to code up their own navigation buttons and labels, while Android just gives developers hooks to those four hardware buttons. The problem? There's no consistency and a distinct lack of labeling on Android. On an iPhone, developers have to create "back" buttons and they get to label them as well so you always know where you're going to end up if you push it (like "Inbox" or "back to twitter"). On Android it's a blind button without a label and sometimes when you hit the back button in a web browser you go back a page and sometimes you jump back to an application that launched the web browser. Sometimes the back button lets you go backward in an app and many times you get the haptic buzz telling you THERE IS NO BACK BUTTON and you're stuck on that screen. I've played with an Eris Android phone as well and the big surprise there was the four hardware buttons aren't even in the same order as my other two Android devices. That seems insane to me.

- Google's internal teams sometimes slap existing features into their apps or they change key features of public apps with little warning (like Google Reader suddenly making the Share button public ages ago). Android is a phone, and every phone needs an address book, right? Google decided to slap my Gmail contacts into the phone and call that the same as an address book, which was a surprise to me. My Gmail contacts are mostly people I email often (including tech support questions to my many websites) and the Venn Diagram of people I email a lot and people I call a lot are vastly different things. I didn't have phone numbers stored in my Gmail contacts for longtime friends I would like to call from the device, so essentially the moment I logged into Google I had a phone with hundreds of people I barely know over email that I would never need to call plus I didn't even have phone numbers for the few I did want to call. If I want to morph this into a usable address book, I have to delete a lot of people and add a lot of data to my contacts, but that might affect how Gmail works on my desktop browser. If I delete someone does that mean their new emails to me might show up as unknown spam? I don't know.

- The iPhone has a lot of "hidden" features. Stuff like holding down keys on the virtual keyboard giving you new options, and screenshots by touching two buttons at once, but the amount of what I'd classify as "hidden" features in Android feels much longer. Every button has a separate long-hold state that offers up menus and options you can't find unless you know to click. The web browser doesn't show you how many windows are open like Mobile Safari. I never know how many apps are even open and running aside from the reports in the upper taskbar. I didn't know silent mode could be accessed from holding the top button for a long time. Every day there's a new hidden feature I'm accidentally stumbling upon to the point the phone feels like a linux command line or a wiki with its own cryptic syntax you have to learn slowly to the point of memorizing lots of keystrokes.

- The trackball on the Nexus One is next to useless. It's much faster for me to point and tap something I want on the screen than scroll through every option with a trackball. It's easy to ignore though.

Like I said, overall, I'm happier with the Android OS, and I'm in love with the Nexus One hardware. The moment the Verizon branded Nexus One goes on sale, I'll pick one up and try to unload my blocky Droid. Despite some issues I have with the iTunes App Store, I do love almost everything about the iPhone for its intuitive interface, great gaming, fantastic multimedia playback, and overall utility, but Android is definitely going to give it a run for its money and I look forward to both platforms innovating. At this point, I feel like each platform has enough strengths that I've become the kind of weirdo that carries two phones around, using the best of both worlds depending on usage.

It's a Kindle World Now

Moments after I first saw a spy shot of the new Kindle 2, I placed an order for one. I'd seen a couple of the first generation units out in public and loved the screen, but the rest of it looked clunky and the new design fixed at least the outside visual aspects of it. I received my Kindle soon after they began shipping and now that I've used it for a month, I figured it'd probably be high time for a review.

The Great

First off, the screen is great and though a subtle backlight would be handy, it's not too hard to treat it like a book and just keep a small bedside lamp on when reading. In the outdoors in direct sunlight, it's really amazing and crisp in a way you'd never expect a computer screen could be.

Before I got a Kindle, I would typically buy 1-2 books every month and only finish reading a book every 3 or 4 months, starting a lot more than I ever completed. It may just be the novelty of this device, but I've read (and completed) 2 books/week since I got it. The other day I read an entire book in one day, something I haven't done in almost ten years. I haven't read this much since college.

I think there may be a few reasons for the uptick and enjoyment in reading. I really love how you can read the Kindle in the same position. Like most people, I read a bit before going to sleep and I have to say reading a paperback or hard cover book is a little uncomfortable in bed. I love that with the Kindle I can get all warm and snuggled under the covers and I don't have to turn to read opposite pages. I can just lay sideways and I don't have to crane my neck to see opposing pages like I would with a book. I really like the simple % done status in the lower left. I occasionally glance at it every ten page refreshes or so, and it's a motivating metric to see you're actually 27% done with a book or 74% done and it makes me more inclined to complete books after I surpass 50%.

I love the flexibility of getting material to the device. It's easy to buy books online at Amazon.com with a web browser (already whenever I hear about a book, I rush to amazon to see if it's in the Kindle format) and the search within the Kindle is fast enough and usable enough to work (I bought a book on the runway before a flight after hearing about it from a friend, and I got to read it on that flight). I loved that I could buy books for it while it was being shipped by UPS to my door, and when it arrived they showed up on the Home screen.

I'm really impressed with the text conversion via email feature. I've been dumping long blog posts and essays I find online to Readability to trim all the sidebars, navigation, and ads from them, then I copy and paste into a text file that gets sent (as an attachment) to my kindle.com email address. 30 seconds later, it shows up on my Kindle ready to read. It goes without saying that when I copy a 10,000 word piece from a magazine site, I feel bad for stripping the ads so I can full read the article, but I'd also gladly pay $0.25 or $0.50 for the article sent clean to my Kindle without all the copy/paste/email hassles if sites offered an instant "Send to your Kindle for a quarter" button. Hopefully Amazon gets on that.

I've also had the "Send random attachments to your Kindle" feature come in handy for early book reviews. I've gotten two preview copies of books written by friends sent to me as Word documents, which were easily emailed to my Kindle for comfortable reading.

Oh, and as SBJ mentioned on twitter, the Kindle makes it easy to read a book while eating lunch in a way most paperbacks and many hardcover books make nearly impossible without smashing the binding flat to keep them stable.

Lastly, the battery life is amazing. I charge my Kindle once a week and even with reading an hour or two a day in between charges I don't get below 50% battery life with the wireless connect left on. Turning the networking off on the device, I've gone over two weeks without a charge. It's nice to not have to take a charger along if I'm heading out for a trip because I know the battery can hold up for at least a week of normal use.

The Fair to Middling

I have to say that I'm not entirely happy with the button layout on the device. Along the right side (middle) there is a Home button that goes to a central contents menu and below that is a Next Page button used while reading books. On the left side of the device opposite those buttons is a Previous Page and Next Page set. Since I usually hold the device with my right hand, I use the right side, and on more than several occasions when I wanted to go back a page, I accidentally hit the Home button, dumping me out of my book entirely. I guess I wish the Home button was in a prominent place, but not up against the Next Page button in a spot I intuitively think a Previous Page button should go.

There are no real page numbers on the device (due to varying font size you set), just some numbers attached to a book describing its total length and a small indicator of which parts the device is currently showing (like a page might say showing "234-244" at the bottom with a total book length of 3572). I personally like the % done number on the lower left, but the content location and total length number in the bottom middle and bottom left are meaningless data junk to me. I'd personally prefer a clock in the lower right that I could glance at every few pages to see if I'm up past my intended bedtime. It's actually kind of a hassle to figure out what time it is because it's not shown by default while reading a book, and I usually hit the menu button to see the time and hit it again to return to my reading.

Overall, the experimental web browser support is about as good as your average cellphone browser. Gmail kind of sorta works but text wraps badly and the joystick navigation is slightly clunky. The keyboard is seldom used and the buttons are small and require more effort than they should. I've never been in a situation where I used a Kindle over my iPhone's superior browser but it may come in handy in a pinch.

The Bad

I'll admit my biggest problem with the Kindle is imaginary. I have to say that I trust Amazon and I love books, and the Kindle is the most convenient device on earth for any book lover, but deep down, I know it's a dangerously convenient device. There's a central point of control (Amazon, which I trust to do the right thing for now, but in the future, who knows), there is DRM, it isn't the most open device (PDF support can be shaky), and you can't really share e-books with anyone like you can an actual book. I say this as a book lover -- I have walls of bookshelves and I love to loan stuff to friends, and I love that my nightstand no longer is crowded with a dozen titles stacked next to it, but I fear for some future 10 years from now where libraries suffer from people no longer having huge amounts of physical books to donate and share, or something awful happening to Amazon and books being banned from the device, or even if the central servers fail and I lose my fake electronic books. I wish there were more free public domain options and I wasn't just lining Amazon's pockets any time I pick up the device. Deep down, I know there's something wrong about abandoning 500 years of beautiful history of the printed word to embrace an electronic commercial text reader but I guess I haven't read enough Sci-Fi to fully articulate why I should be more afraid than I already am at the ramifications of the device.

I know it's a bargain for the device if you think about a lifetime free 3G connection comes along with it, but I have to say the $359 price tag seems too high. At $99 or $199, I'd give these away as gifts to everyone I know and I would hope many more people would buy them. I've already read a dozen books and I purchased those along with at least a dozen more so hopefully in the future they could treat the Kindle as the free razor with the ebooks as the razor blades that make up for the hardware costs. I'm sure over the next year I'll eventually match the sticker price of the Kindle and over the next few years I may end up spending thousands on the device.

I guess lastly, I kind of hate the name Kindle. It doesn't make me think of a brain getting excited. My first association wasn't "oh it kindles your interest" but rather "kindle, you know like kindling, like how paper is used in a fire." It's probably just me, but the first thing I think about when I hear the word "Kindle" is book burning and censorship and every ugly mental image from Fahrenheit 451.

Conclusion

I love the hell out of the Kindle 2. I wish it were cheaper and I wish there were open APIs to the device and tons of free book options, but it's really simple to use, the screen works great for me, and I'm reading tons of books without having to send a UPS truck to my door several times a week. I can't recommend it enough.

Does a $5,000 bike improve an amateur cyclist's performance?

If you've ever spent much time around cyclists, you've certainly noticed they love to talk gear and if you've ever picked up a bike magazine, you've been inundated with ads extolling the virtues of bike performance. It's nearly impossible to separate the marketing fluff from facts whenever doing research on a new bike purchase, given that most publications (both online and off) publishing reviews also take advertising from the companies behind the products. While researching a possible new high-end road bike purchase (I'm riding a 500 mile, week-long event at the end of the summer and thought shaving 3-4lbs off my bike would be nice), I came across the Competitive Cyclist website and I spotted something novel: they offer pro-level bike rentals/demos shipped directly to you for a week.

I immediately recognized the brilliance of a demo program like this -- while magazines and website reviews can all sound the same ("vertically compliant while laterally stiff"), the proof is in the pavement. A week of riding roads I'm familiar with would be a lot more informative than the common 10 minute test ride around a bike shop. I wanted to know what a $5,000 road bike with "crisp, tight handling" and also with "forgiving ride characteristics" felt like on the same roads I ride several hundred miles every year (which I typically do on a $1700 "recreational" aluminum frame/carbon fork Lemond). And more to the point: for an average recreational cyclist like me (60-80 miles ridden on a good week, in the 16-17mph avg speed range), does a $5,000 bike really improve your speed all that much?

I decided to experiment with myself and pony up the $300 to rent a bike for one week (the $300 can be applied to a new purchase if I buy it in the next month). I specified the size I needed, put in my details and a week later, it showed up at my door. Assembly was very easy, just throwing the wheels on, airing up the tires, and putting the bars on the stem. A few adjustments and the addition of my own pedals and it was ready to ride. A quick jump on the bathroom scale holding my old bike showed it was 21.0 pounds with pedals (no water bottle or bag), while the Cervelo with my pedals attached was just 17.4 pounds for the 61cm bike (their largest frame). 3.6 pounds is a pretty significant weight savings for road bikes.

The hyperbole around this specific Cervelo model is that it's really stiff, really light, but also forgiving on the roads, with a more comfortable ride than similar carbon race bikes. From the moment I got on it, I could feel that it was much more responsive. On the same road loops I've been riding for the past few years, I was surprised by how the bike seemed to lurch forward whenever I put a little extra effort on hill climbs. I never thought of my regular bike as inefficient, but you push down on the R3 and it really goes. The handling was great as well -- my typical ride features a couple high-speed tight turns that make me nervous on my regular bike but the Cervelo tracked them tighter and easier than I've ever done them before.

Results

I spent a week on the bike, riding a little over 100 miles on five rides total. Since I wanted to compare rides on this bike versus my previous bike, I did the exact same distances I rode regularly: a 5 mile short fast loop (~13min), a 15 mile loop (~50min), a 27 mile loop (~90-100min), and a 35 mile loop (~2hrs). I have some data on each ride (1, 2, 3), all done in the last couple weeks and some with data going back two years. I've been on a steady schedule the last month or so, and I took the fastest ride time I ever did on my old bike, vs. one ride on the same distance on the Cervelo. Here are the results:

The results appear to be pretty consistent with one outlying sample, but since this isn't a real experiment and I couldn't eliminate all possible variables I should say that the variability in improvement is largely due to how much rest I got between rides. On the shortest 5 mile ride, I did it a day after a long ride, and I usually take a day of rest (with rest, it'd be another 30 seconds faster). Wind and weather affected the 15 and 27 mile rides each time I went out on the demo bike, further slowing me down. The longest ride on the demo bike was my strongest ride to date -- I slept an amazing 10 hours the night before and the winds were surprisingly calm. The previous 35 mile slower ride I'm comparing it to was the first time I did it alone and I rode it very conservatively.

More importantly than the % improvement in my ride times, I did consistently ride faster, in the 17-18mph range on most rides, while the past few years of riding have always had me stuck in the 16-17mph average. My training goals have been to eventually work my way up to consistent rides in the 18-20mph average range. Moving up 0.5-1.5 mile an hour of average speed over an hour of riding on the demo bike was no small feat, taking me months of regular training in the past, and I've never been able to do a ride over an hour long in the 18mph range until that demo bike ride.

Bottom Line

The obvious question is whether or not going from a $1,500 average aluminum bike to a $5,000 handcrafted carbon bike is worth the added expense. For some people, shaving seconds off your time is a worthy goal while I would suspect most recreational athletes might want to see 10%-25% time/speed improvements on common workouts. I only found mild performance improvements on my own rides, on the order of single-digit percentage increases in speed and decreases in ride times. It's definitely tough to justify spending 2-3x the amount of money without getting huge changes.

My hope with this test was to prove to myself that magazines and websites and all the bike geek talk was for naught. As much as I love reading about all the latest gadgets in the cycling world, I've long been skeptical about their actual utility and I wanted some data to back it up. In this test I expected to see negligible gains, I expected a rough ride on a stiff frame, and I expected to conclude that $5,000 bikes are generally a waste of money for all but the top athletes. I wanted to free myself from the feeling that I had to constantly upgrade every year to the latest, lightest parts available.

The one thing I can't deny was the incredible feel of the Cervelo R3 when compared to any other bike I've ever ridden. After spending 25 years of my life on BMX and mountain bikes, the first time I took a spin on a road bike I fell in love with the feeling of raw power, blinding speed, and perfect efficiency. I bought my first road bike because it felt like there was nothing standing in between my legs pushing down in some effort and wheels spinning me forward at speeds I'd never attained on flat ground before. When I got up out of the saddle on my first climb with the R3, that same miraculous feeling again washed over me. Here was a new level of efficiency, a perfect melding of body and machine, with not an ounce of wasted effort going towards coasting down the road as fast as possible. The Cervelo R3 simply doesn't hold you back, transmitting every ounce of your effort into progress on the road.

In the end, I'll admit the $5,000 bike won me over on feel more than performance, though the gains weren't too shabby. I attained speeds I've never ridden at before and I suspect if I owned a similar bike that I'd continue to improve and attain levels I couldn't do with my old bike. But more importantly everything about riding felt better on the high end machine. Shifting was instant and precise, climbing hills was faster and easier, and I had more control and could take tight turns at faster speeds. After my 18+mph two hour long ride was over, I felt like I could turn around and ride another 35 miles at that pace and I decided then and there that I'd bite the bullet and purchase a high-end road bike. I eventually settled on a Cervelo RS, a slightly cheaper version of the R3 with a better fit for taller riders like me. At this moment, it's on a UPS truck headed this way, showing up sometime next week.

The five minute Leopard review

After installing Leopard on three machines and using it for the past four days I figure I might as well write down my first impressions. Here are the high and low points for me:

• The installer is a bit buggy in that it doesn't seem to recognize hard drives with any sorts of special partitions made for previous versions of Boot Camp (made by Apple themselves!). One Mac required wiping out the Boot Camp partition completely before I could proceed, the other asked me to open disk utility and do some sort of GFI Journaling thing or something that I can't remember and could barely decipher. It took quite a bit of noodling with the installer to figure out where Disk Utility was and in a buried advanced menu was the option I needed. Why didn't the installer just do it for me with a quick one-button click? I've had Microsoft Windows installs go smoother than my macbook install of Leopard.
• Spotlight is super speedy now, to the point where it works as fast as Quicksilver used to for application launching. I say "used to" because Quicksilver lost its index of my system after upgrading and couldn't seem to launch very basic apps I use dozens of times each day. I ended up breaking down and uninstalling it today, converting over to Spotlight instead.
• Things seem a little faster and a little more stable (less beachballs, for sure).
• Time Machine is a godsend. I've been waiting for a transparent backup system with easy retrieval for the past ten years, ever since I worked in a place with nightly full backups saved for months on end (but even then, retrieval was a pain). I rarely have hard drives crash, but I accidentally trash or tweak Photoshop, Textmate, Excel, and Word files all the time. Getting a copy from a day, a week, or a month previous has already saved me once since I installed Leopard and I suspect it'll be the kind of thing I use for fetching previous versions of mockups and writing drafts often. I really hope they return the network storage feature, since I could easily hook a usb drive to my airport extreme and just have my computers backup to that.
• The downside of Time Machine is that I have noticed a couple beachballs and my second hard drive spin up around the top of the hour. I figure it's probably Time Machine since my second hard drive is entirely dedicated to that, and it's only about 20 seconds of unexplained lock-up, but it's still annoying when you're in the middle of something and you have to wait for it to finish whatever it is doing.
• Firefox is my browser of choice and seems to take forever to launch. I usually leave it open all day, but it seems to take about a minute to launch on my 4-processor machine. Safari pops up in just a couple seconds, so I'll either prune my extensions and hope for a quicker firefox, or move over to Safari when I'm in a hurry and just want to look something up real quick.
• Screen sharing in iChat is freaking awesome. I'd finally have no qualms about buying my dad a mac now, since I could give him tech support whenever he needed by just popping in and fixing things over iChat. I also like the new Keynote iChat sharing as that might be a great way to practice my talks for upcoming conferences.

Overall, Leopard looks like a welcome upgrade and I can't wait to see what application authors do with the new animation capabilities.

Testing out .Mac, iMovie '08, and the Panasonic AVCHD

I used PCs on a daily basis for about ten years, but over the last three or four years I've become a full-fledged Apple fanboy convert. I buy a new mac about once a year or so and have tried out pretty much every product they've released over the last few years. So when Steve Jobs debuted iLife '08 and mentioned iMovie worked with the new AVCHD format available in $700 Panasonic cameras, I bought one to give it a go.

Today I put all this new software and hardware to the test. I carried the video camera around and shot a few things during a visit to the Oregon Garden. I came home, imported all the clips into iMovie, arranged a few and threw a song on top of it. Finally, I uploaded it to my "Web Gallery".

Here is the resulting 3 minute movie

Quick review of each aspect

Panasonic HDC-SD1 Camera

This is a great camcorder. I've had and used a couple mini-DV camcorders over the last few years and this was easier to use and packed with more features than I was used to. My favorite thing is that it writes all video to a special 4Gb SD card (most card readers can't understand it, so I just use the included USB cables with the camera). What is great about ditching tapes and simply using a memory card is the unit is much lighter than a camcorder that uses tapes, and if you're reviewing ten previous recorded clips, say clip 1, and you hit the record button, it'll start recording clip 11 in the right place (no more fast forwarding or taping over previous video).

It charges fairly fast and video looks fantastic on my 46" 1080p LCD. I can't believe a little $750 camcorder can do such nice high def stuff. About the only downside I've found in use is the microphone which is about what you'd expect (only works well if someone's standing directly in front of it speaking) and if I really wanted to film a nice movie I'd need some external microphones.

So far in two weeks of using this, I'm finding that since I don't have to fumble for tapes or worry if I'm taping over something, and since it's small and light, I use this much more than my previous camcorders.

iMovie '08

iMovie is completely different in the new iLife suite. David Pogue has written a scathing review because they changed everything compared to the old version and actually removed some functionality, but I followed the use-case presented by Jobs in the last Apple demo: I recorded some clips about a trip and assembled them really quickly in the editor. Compared with iMovie '06, I'd say the new version is much easier and faster to make short videos. I used the previous version on a handful of occasions and found myself using the help files more than the iMovie tools themselves. With iMovie '08, the things Steve Jobs did in his demo pretty much covers the entire application. I edited my movie in about 20 minutes total, which is at least twice as fast as me doing the same thing in the old version. The "skimming" feature where you mouse over clips is incredible and really handy for testing out sections of clips you want to cut.

.Mac and the Web Gallery

I've never been much of a fan or user of the .Mac service. I only had to pay for it once when coworkers used to share some tools and I let my membership lapse until today. So far it seems like a nice backup space to keep 10Gb of files but mostly I wanted it for the tight integration with iMovie. I have to say it's really, really easy to upload something to your .Mac webspace by simply clicking a menu item and telling iMovie to do its magic. Time will tell if it's worth keeping for more than a year but so far I really like the photo galleries and movie player pages.

The Nike iPod System

This week I'm running again after a nearly two year hiatus. What finally motivated me to get off the couch and start running was the Nike+ system. I've written my own exercise tracking apps in the past and it required that I manually enter details about each run, then I would write my own visualization apps. After I saw how the Nike iPod thing records and uploads your data with no intervention needed and then spits out nice graphs with goals and group activities, I knew I had to try it. When Nike finally came out with some stability shoes for fat guys like me (the Air Equalon, which I can't link to in their Flash interface), I pulled the trigger and got the whole setup.

I took my first jog today and it worked great. I like that you can run for a set time, a set distance, or to burn a set number of calories. I also like that your iPod tells you when you're half done and counts down the minutes as you get close to your goal. I noticed the system reminded me at the same intervals I would have checked my watch myself, so it works really well.

The kicker on the whole Nike+ thing was something I've never seen online before: Hatphones. It's a flexible beanie with embedded headphones and a pocket for a iPod nano complete with a nano wheel cut-out. It's perfect for winter here in Oregon and I don't have to have wires running down my shirts. I must admit it's a bit weird to push on your head when you want to change songs, but otherwise it's a clever little package.

I'll post an update in a few months after I've used this a while to track my running progress. My hope is to get back up to running 15-20 miles a week and doing 5k and 10k runs for fun. If anyone knows of a nike+ widget I could run on my site to show miles/runs, leave a link in the comments -- one of the best motivations to exercise or lose weight is good old public shaming.

Pile O' Tips

I've been meaning to write up each and every one of these tips for weeks now, but I'll never get around to fully fleshing them out so instead here's a bunch of things I've learned over the past few months that might help you as well:

• When picking people up curbside at the airport, tell your friends/family to meet you in departures, not arrivals. Especially on weekends and holidays, the arrivals area at most major airports will back up ridiculously as people hog the lanes and wait for people. A couple days before Christmas, we landed and I went out to fetch the car and pick up the rest of the family, but had to wait in a 15min long line to pick them up. The departures area was dead. I used this tip on Saturday and it worked great, as there were no lines and no waiting.


• Last year I finally started joining frequent flier programs and when I noticed I was renting cars often, I decided to go with Hertz, and I went beyond the normal program and paid $50/year for the Gold membership. It's the best money I ever spent. Now when I arrive at a destination, I just walk over to hertz, note my name and parking location on a big lighted board and walk up to my awaiting car and drive off. It literally saves 30-40 minutes of lines, waiting, and more lines every time I use it. For someone that rents cars often, it's totally worth the $4 and change per month.


• When you travel with a baby, it helps to have an extra room in your hotel so you can have some separation of space and your child won't see you and want to be picked up at 3am. It's not always feasible to get a hotel suite, but I've found a real bargain in Embassy Suites. It's pretty much an average Holiday Inn style room, but it's about 15ft longer, giving you a living room area in front of the bedroom complete with desks and sofas. We put the baby's crib in there, and could put her to bed early and still read, talk, or watch TV in the other room while she slept. Plus, we could let her wake up slowly in her own room. Bonus points for this hotel giving a free breakfast buffet for two with every room. The price isn't much higher than a typical business travel hotel and works wonders for a traveling family.


• If you give presentations, please drop everything and read Beyond Bullet Points. It is written by someone that worked at Microsoft but hates the standard Powerpoint defaults. He teaches you basic story structure from theater and has a great system for creating dramatic presentations. I read this book and used the lessons to give a talk last year and it was my best talk ever. I got loads of compliments from the audience and I felt really confident and prepared going in (reading them online without any context leaves a lot to be desired but you can probably get the gist of it).

Crap I love: Wesabe

After working on my own for a year, this past summer I finally got around to examining my finances. I did what most people do: I got a copy of the latest Quicken, spent a week entering data into it, and then I stared at graphs wondering how on earth my spending always seemed to go up when my income went up, even though it didn't feel like I was going on new shopping sprees.

I quickly found Quicken to be a bear. The category system is a pain, and every charge can only have one category attached. Making new categories and arranging subcategories would frequently crash Quicken 2007 for the Mac, making me lose work in the process. Like every other time I've tried to use some piece of financial software, I eventually gave up.

About a month ago, I started using the Wesabe beta (co-founder Marc Hedlund is a friend of a friend). The app has lofty aim of helping you track spending, realize your goals, and share tips with everyone. There are also social effects, where people using the same merchant can post reviews, allowing you to surf around for a new mechanic or grocery store based on other members' satisfaction and spending.

For me, the main draw was simply having a powerful web version of something like Quicken, but flexible like flickr or delicious. Instead of categories, there are tags. And you can put any number of tags on something, and sort spending per tag. This is a really big breakthrough. A few things I discovered from doing this:

• I tagged every gas station purchase with gas and auto. With a single click, I could see how much I spent just on gasoline each month and I could also see how much I spent overall on owning cars (by tagging all payments and repairs with auto).


• Among the dozens of gas fill-ups I had this year I noticed some were for roadtrips, so I could tack on a tag for that single trip (and add the tag: travel), then tag every other purchase from that trip with the city name. One click on the roadtrip city name and I could see how much that trip cost me, and I could also see how much travel in general cost me each month.


• I've taken to tagging any purchase that is a gift to myself, or an extravagance, or any non-necessary thing with: extra. In a click, I can see how much money I waste each month on silly gadgets, bike upgrades, and wacky t-shirts. There was never an easy way to get that kind of data from Quicken.

The other smart thing Wesabe does is make data entry easy. My bank gives me some ugly metadata that usually just features the address of the business where a charge was made. In Quicken, I'd have to memorize 1590 Booth Bend road equalled Lowe's Hardware and I'd have to categorize every purchase by hand. Wesabe is pretty slick in that you put a description in once for a merchant, then the app finds each and every purchase ever made at that same chunk of metadata, and automatically copies the tags and description for the first one you marked. Thanks to this feature, I tagged and described an entire year's worth of purchases in about 90 minutes. Now, I do weekly updates from my bank data and it takes just a few minutes to keep everything up to date.

The app is still new, and about the only drawbacks I've found is that the history reporting and graphing doesn't feel completely built out yet (and I've heard lots more is to come in that realm). I'm used to Quicken's graph magic and Measuremap and Google Analytics where you can click on any bar graph and figure out what exactly caused a spike. At the moment, the bar graphs simply report your patterns in spending but lack any sort of "zoom" feature to get more detail.

It didn't take long for me to fall in love with Wesabe. At every point where Quicken stood in the way of my progress with ease-of-use roadblocks, Wesabe makes it painless. Now that it's open to the public, the Tips and Goals sections might get built out more and the social aspects will kick in, but at the very least, the accounting section of the app is truly killer and helping me finally get a handle on my spending.

Wesabe (free, probably paid pro options in the future)