Adam Sternbergh recently wrote a lengthy explainer on Emoji, those Japanese icons that have pervaded our text and instant messages. One aspect of the article caught my attention. Speaking from the perspective of a Gen-Xer, he notes that communicating in Emoji has been especially popular with “our” parents:
Many people I spoke to relayed that their moms were the most enthusiastic adopters of emoji they knew. One woman said that her near-daily text-message-based interaction with her mother consists almost entirely of strings of emoji hearts. Another woman, with a septuagenarian mother, revealed to me that her mom had recently sent a text relaying regret, followed by a crying-face emoji—and that this was possibly the most straightforwardly emotional sentiment her mother had ever expressed to her.
As a data point, I offer my own mother.
Over the last few months, my mother began messaging me, which she almost never did in favoring of calling me, and increasingly started to insert a series of Emojis in each message. She ends each communication with the Older Woman Emoji, which acts as a signature for her messages.
I have to admit that the Mac OS/ iOS version of the Older Woman Emoji does look a bit like my mom but only because of her grey hair, which she’s had since her thirties. My mom would have to take off her glasses, pull her hair back, and put on some lipstick to really look like the Apple version of Older Woman Emoji.
Older Woman Emoji
My mother and I.
And when she wants to include a reference to my dad, she inserts the Man Emoji. Again, the Apple version of this Emoji does resemble my father, or at least when he was a bit younger.
Man Emoji
My father does in fact resemble that Emoji.
That’s pretty impressive when you consider that only four years ago, my mother referred to every digital device she ever encountered as “that thing.”
I have. I even used it for a few years. It was a neat app that sniffs through your social accounts, such as Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and Foursquare (now Swarm), to present you with a list of things you posted on this day one, two, three, or even more years ago.
Timehop requires a Facebook account to work. You can’t use another identity system, such as Twitter, Google+, or a username and a password. If you don’t have an active Facebook account, you can’t use it. And because I quit Facebook, I also quit Timehop.
I deactivated my Facebook account a few days after Sarah and I broke up. At one time, leaving Facebook was an unthinkable choice, something that disillusioned young teens and millennials did once their parents took to the social networking site. I wouldn’t say that quitting Facebook was a difficult choice as much as it was a necessary one. Almost everything about my life was about to change with that breakup, and I wanted to remove myself from this toxic digital garden that tethered me to that past. I didn’t want to deal with seemingly empty, well-meaning words of support from my friends, which would likely stop after a few days or weeks. I didn’t want to post some self-affirming quip and to have friends “like” it as if that would repair my shattered self-esteem. I also didn’t want to see my list of friends dwindle one-by-one as our almost one-hundred mutual friends took her side over mine. And, because of how my friends use Facebook, I couldn’t bear to read everyone’s endless stream good news and happy talk. I needed to quit Facebook, not to move on, but to forget and to disappear.
Nearly four months later, a lot of that despair is more or less behind me. Quitting Facebook likely helped because it forced me to reset almost everything and to reassess the meaningful relationships in my life.1 I no longer wonder what someone close to me is doing because I can reach them directly and ask them. And if I want to post something, I can do that on this website and share it with the entire open web.
A day or two ago, I met with my friend Joe, who is going through a divorce, and thus, we are confronting a lot of similar issues and challenges. As we shared our sad experiences, both crushing defeats and small victories, he formulated some advice for anyone going through a breakup:
Delete Timehop.
I asked him why.
He said that each day, each little reminder about what you did “on this day” some years ago is not a gentle tap from the past. Each one, he said, is like a punch in the gut.
My decision to leave Facebook, and consequently Timehop, seems like an especially wise one.2
Curiously, I have kept my Instagram account going but mostly because the posts there are less about everyone’s good news or random thoughts or complaints. Also, the number of people I follow is significantly smaller. ↩
Also, without a Facebook account, I am also barred from joining Tinder. ↩
A few months ago, I bought a fountain pen. I had wanted to get a nice pen for a while, but two things scared me:
What if I lose the pen? Fountain pens are kind of expensive. A nice futuristic refillable pen, such as the Pilot Custom Heritage, with a plastic body but a 14K gold nib, costs about $250.
What if I get the “wrong” one? Have you seen how many words I’ve written and hours I’ve sunk into learning about something simple, such as brewing coffee? I am certain I could easily do the same with pens. Apparently, it’s quite common to obsess over pens, and I am anxious about doing it wrong. I could easily imagine spending lots of money trying to find the right one.
The not-so-early verdict is that I got a decent couple of pens for a beginner like me. The price was right, less than $30 each, and both pens feel great and look really nice. Part of the reason I bought these pens was for the tactile experience, and these provide a satisfactory one for me. One of the many variables with fountain pens is the size of the nib—the metal tip that controls the flow of ink. The Safari I ordered came with a fine nib, which I read was a good choice for beginners on a variety of different papers. (Yes, your paper matters, too.) However, when I ordered the Vista, I got it with an extra fine nib. Even at first write, I didn’t like it. It did make nice fine lines, but it felt too scratchy to me. The touch-and-feel wasn’t right.
I had considered buying a whole new pen, but then I learned that you can simply replace the nib with a piece of office or packing tape. I bought a fine nib for about $15 and the installation was a cinch.
As for ink, I really hated using the stock LAMY ink cartridge. Instead, I bought a converter. A converter allows you to buy a bottle of any ink you want and fill your pen with it. You’re not subject to using specific cartridges that are only made or licensed by LAMY. As for ink, I was intrigued on a message board about Noodler’s Ink. They make a ton of different colors and are best known for their archival-quality ink, which is important to me, as well as the smooth flow of the ink. I ordered a jar of black, and that’s what I’ve been using in my demonstrator pen since early September.
I also loaded the charcoal pen with a Burgundy ink cartridge from Monteverde. The color struck me because it would be great for grading, which I really made use of over the last month, but it would also be bold enough to look distinct for casual writing.
The only change I would make to my current setup is to look for blue-black ink. I’ve seen a few demonstrations of it, such as the Monteverde Blue-Black, and I like it. It looks vibrant yet unique, but it is still serious enough to look professional.
And if I make any drastic changes, look for me to spill some proverbial ink on this site about it.
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Here are some specs: The 8 pound camera recorded 0.01 megapixel black and white photos to a cassette tape. The first photograph took 23 seconds to create. To play back images, data was read from the tape and then displayed on a television set. We’re sure come a long way since then, eh?
Sure, we have.
Twenty three seconds is a long time to make a photograph. I wonder how much of that is due to gathering enough light to make an acceptable exposure versus the amount of time it takes to process the light into 10,000 pixels (0.01 megapixels) then into digital bits.
He was the on-air pitchman for an electronics chain bearing his name here in the New York tri-state area, throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Crazy Eddie’s persona and advertising strategy serves as a classic example of nuisance marketing (or irritation advertising, if you prefer). His ads would grate on you, but those same commercials would also forever remind you of their insane prices. In Los Angeles, I remember that we had a similar pitchman in Fred R. Rated for The Federated Group, a cut-rate electronics, played by Shadoe Stevens.
Although I can’t find the reference, I am pretty certain that John Gruber once called Amazon the crazy guy at the party who will accept any dare you propose. Amazon has apparently accepted the dare to sell a over-the-top streaming device for $39. And if that wasn’t crazy enough, Amazon Prime members can buy one for $19 until Wednesday morning.
The Fire TV stick, as it’s called, is basically what Google was selling last holiday season in the Chromecast. The biggest advantage of the Amazon Fire TV stick is that it will play anything from the Amazon Prime streaming library, including movies, music, and TV programs. Consider me tempted.
Can they really make money off a $20 streaming stick? Just sign up for a Prime trial, get the device for $20, and after the trial is over, keep the device to stream Netflix, Hulu, and some other “streaming channel.”
It does seem a little crazy, doesn’t it?
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Today, I read the following phrase on a midterm exam:
You can download MP3s onto cassettes.
That is like getting Arby’s to go and then freezing it so you can microwave it and eat it later. Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.
I worry about the new fascination with cassette tapes. Of all the recording media I ever used, cassette tapes were by far the worst. The sound was horrible. They wore out fairly quickly, which made the horrible sound even worse. I remember some recordings that sounded like the band was drowning under water. Also, the cassette tape was susceptible to damage by a cheap tape player. I remember seeing a Bic pen in a friend’s car for when his cheap deck would eat the tape right out of the cassette. He would use the pen to wind the tape back into the cassette.
I know that for the “kids today,” the cassette is a novel way to hold your music, and it’s portable to boot. It’s also probably the only physical form they’ve had to carry music. My generation has the same fascination with records, but at least those disks have a richer and warmer sound than digital formats. And we got a square-foot canvas for the cover art, which itself is a forgotten art form.
Or maybe, I really am getting older faster than I thought.
For the last two weeks, I have been using an iPhone 6. In almost every conceivable way, it’s been an upgrade from my iPhone 5. The larger size is the first noticeable difference, but I have gotten used to it and even come to appreciate it. Reading is more pleasant, and I am generating fewer typos because of more spacious keyboard layout. However, I am now working on my second phone. After about a week of using the first one, I noticed a dead pixel that warranted a replacement.
Three O’Clock… In the Morning?
Buying an iPhone on launch day is a vicious cycle. Because I am always eligible for an upgrade around the time a new iPhone form factor comes out, such as iPhone 4, iPhone 5, and now iPhone 6, there’s little reason for me to wait to get a new phone. It also helps that I start getting paid from my teaching jobs in mid-September after a three-month payroll drought over the summer months.
Like I did in 2010 and 2012, I set an alarm for the morning Apple started taking pre-orders at 3:00 AM Eastern Time. Every hardcore Apple fan knows Apple starts taking preorders for the newest iPhone and iPad at midnight Pacific Time. Another bit of wisdom that many of us have learned over the years is that the best way to preorder your shiny new device is to forgo visiting apple.com and to instead use the Apple Store app. I’ve done it at least three times, and I’ve never had to contend with broken HTTP connections or timeout errors. “It just works.”
Three-Hour Wait
The iPhone 6 was released two weeks ago on Friday, September 19. I was pretty busy that day route marking for Escape New York and starting the arduous process of packing up my stuff in Long Island City, with the help of my parents. Thus, I was unable to pickup my phone from the Grand Central Terminal Apple Store at 8:00 AM. The earliest I could get there was at 2:00 PM, and when I arrived, it was a veritable clusterfuck. The line for people looking to buy a phone without a preorder was at least a few-hundred persons deep. Even the line for people with preorders, according to the blue-shirted employee who guided me to the appropriate queue, required about three hours of your patience. I decided to leave and try back later.
I was spared from waiting in a line like this one at the Fifth Avenue Apple Store. (AP Photo/Julie Jacobson)
I returned to the same store at 8:00 PM that night, and the lines were gone. The store had sold out of phones, and there were people sitting on flattened cardboard boxes, apparently waiting for the next day’s supply to arrive. I explained to the security guard outside Grand Central Terminal that I had a reservation to pickup my phone. After he inspected the message on my Apple Store app indicating that my order was ready, he whisked me upstairs to get my phone. I was in and out in less than five minutes.
You’re Using it Wrong
I realize how crazy it might sound to go through all this trouble to get a new phone when the one I had before, a two-year old iPhone 5, was perfectly serviceable. Is it that “buying a new phone is part of a broad and serious American affliction?”
Paul Roberts has been hawking this Postmanesque diatribe. According to Roberts, most people who get new phones resemble those who “amuse ourselves to death” and measure “the extra productivity of a new device by ‘how many cat videos you can watch in an hour.'”
Sorry, but I am not most people. I use the shit out of my phone. After two weeks of using it, I have noticed some significant improvements in the iPhone 6 over the iPhone 5.
The larger form factor had made it easier to type. I can’t accurately measure this, but it seems like I am making fewer typos with the new phone. The only thing that gets in the way is the predictive typing, which I thought was really nifty on my iPhone 5 for the two days I had iOS 8 on it before upgrading to the newer phone. But now it feels like I can type faster than ever before. I am even better at typing my 1Password passphrase, which is very, very long. But I don’t need to type that as often because…
Touch ID has changed my life. Do you remember how we lived our lives without a search engine to find out whatever we wanted to know? I don’t. That’s how I feel about Touch ID. It took about two days to forget what it was like to not have this feature. How did I ever get by without it? It has saved me so much time, and I can now easily unlock my phone on the bike, though never while riding. I stop, pull out the phone, unlock it, respond via dictation, put the phone back in my pocket, and ride on… all in less than thirty seconds.
Incremental improvements add up. The battery gets me through a whole day and then some. The camera is significantly better, and I feel a little less anxious about shooting in low light. However, I still wish I could close the aperture for better depth of field like I can on a dedicated camera. And the screen is also much better: brighter with richer colors.
Bigger battery means more uninterrupted work. On Monday, I forgot to pack the VGA adapter for my MacBook Pro, although I do have a Lightning to VGA adapter as my EDC. I had no way to present my slide deck other than to use my iPhone. It worked flawlessly and I still went the rest of the workday without reaching for a charging cable.
The phone appears to hold up better to cosmetic damage than my iPhone 5. After only a month or so, my iPhone 5 already had visible scratches and few dents! It’ll be interesting to see how the new phone holds up after a month or two… and then a year or two.
iOS 8 is a really nice upgrade to the iPhone experience. There have been a lot of changes from the phone I was using in early September to the phone I have now. But many of those changes are based on the new iOS 8 software. If you have an iPhone 5c, or 5s, you already have a lot of benefits, such as:
Third-party apps can authenticate you with Touch ID;
Messages, Safari, and Mail, the three apps I use the most, are significantly improved, and I love the new features.
I will be able to use Apple Pay. I am anxiously awaiting for this service to launch in October, and because it needs the NFC hardware, the only way it will work is with an iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus, or an Apple Watch. And as much of an Apple fan boy as I am, I am unsure why I would need one. I’ll stick to the phone in my pocket as my personal computing device for now.
One Pixel in a Million
After about ten days of use, I noticed something. My new iPhone 6 had a dead pixel. It took me so long to notice it because it was right over the Phone app icon, in the top-left corner of the app icon grid, and who ever uses that app? For a while I thought it was a scratch. These new displays make it the screen content look like it sits on the screen not beneath it so I thought I could wipe it off. I couldn’t.
A dead pixel near the top of the earpiece of the Phone app. I’m curious what this app does.
The dead pixel is in the location bar of Safari.
After some kvetching, I figured it would be worth it to take it to the Apple Store to get it checked. They confirmed that it was a dead pixel. The usual protocol to fix this issue is to replace the screen, but since the phone is so new, they didn’t have replacement screens. They had to treat my phone as DOA and gave me a new replacement for free.
It seems petty to get a whole new phone over a dead pixel (or two). After all, this phone has a million pixels (1334 x 750). Back in the mid-1980s, it was almost unthinkable to have a computer that had a megapixel display, and I myself wouldn’t have a computer with that much resolution until the early 2000s. But this is something I am going to use every single day for the next two years. That’s a long time to look at something dead.
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Like millions of others, I ordered a iPhone 6 yesterday. This is the fifth iOS device that I bought for delivery on launch day, including an iPad 2, iPhone 4, iPhone 5, and iPad Air, and each time it’s been a different experience. Ideally, the best way to receive one of these devices on launch day is to have it shipped to my work because I don’t risk missing a delivery. But I’ve only been able to do that once. Every other time, I have to visit an Apple Store.
This time when I ordered the phone, I had to verify my billing address, which is currently a PO box in Manhattan. When I tried to finalize the order, it would not let me change the shipping address to my work address at NYU. Instead, it forced me to ship the phone to my PO box. I feared that, because Apple usually uses a service like FedEx and UPS for home deliveries, my order would get stalled since those couriers cannot deliver to a PO box. The only other option I had was to pickup the phone at my nearest Apple Store, which is at Grand Central Terminal. Well, I guess that’s where I’ll be on Friday morning to get my phone.
One of the considerations for ordering phone was the size. Even before I saw the phones, when talk of the new sizes were circulating around the rumor mill, I had decided that I wanted the smallest size Apple would offer. Ars Technica provided a PDF with three phones printed to scale: iPhone 5, iPhone 6, and iPhone 6 Plus. You can print it and cut out the phones to see which one you like for yourself.
I found that the iPhone 6 Plus was huge compared to the iPhone 6, and it didn’t feel like a phone. (I also found that I need a shave.)
I could handle the iPhone 6 with one hand, but I found it impossible to reach the various corners of the screen on the iPhone 6 Plus. And the larger phone seemed like an entirely different species compared to my stalwart iPhone 5.
Speaking of my iPhone 5, as reliable as it has been, it’s pretty beat up after about two years of steady use.
Cracked Back and Scratched Edges on my iPhone 5
My iPhone 5 is Beat Up
Cracked Back and Scratched Edges on my iPhone 5
It has been dropped a few times which account for the dings along the rounded corners. Those could have been prevented by installing a bumper. However if you notice the scratches on the side, those are there because of the bumper. It was only when I removed the bumper that I noticed that the phone had these scratches.
There is also a crack along the top of the phone, near the camera. I have no idea how that happened. I wonder if it’s from keeping the phone in my back pocket during my bike commutes.
Because of all this damage, I won’t be able to sell that phone for $200 like I did for my iPhone 4 two years ago, but I was able to get $70 from Gazelle. And I can hold on to that phone until my new phone arrives. I always get a little sad when I sell these, but the cash to pay for a new phone helps get over that sadness.
On Friday, I will be picking up an iPhone 6, 64 GB in Space Grey on AT&T.
All this month, Soundcheck, the daily music show on our local NPR cash-cow WNYC, is airing a series on the music of the summer of 1994 because that was twenty years ago and, looking back, that was a pretty nifty year for music. That was also the summer after I graduated high school and eagerly anticipated my move to college.
Man, that was a long time ago.
To give you an idea of how long ago that was, most of my music listening happened in my car1, and my way of listening in a car seems downright antiquated. The centerpiece of my in-car music system was a $300 Sony Discman CD player that came with a three-second memory buffer. That memory prevented the CD from skipping anytime I hit a pothole.
I could power this device with batteries, but it would barely last an hour, especially if the buffer was being used, not nearly enough for a drive from my parent’s home in the Antelope Valley to my school in Santa Barbara. To keep the tunes going, I used a DC adapter. I know many people still use these to charge a phone or, if you’re a cab driver, a standalone GPS unit. The charging port in cars from those days was designed as a cigarette lighter because in those days, there were more people who smoked than people who used a handheld computer. Getting that outlet to power an electronic device was, I think, one of the most clever hacks ever devised.
Listening to the CD player through the car’s audio system required another hack using a car audio cassette adapter that connected to the line-out jack from my Discman. I would insert the other end, shaped like a cassette tape, into the tape deck. Also, with that adapter I was guaranteed backward compatibility: I could listen to cassettes and CDs, and I wasn’t forced to upgrade until I was tired of exhausting my tape deck’s cutting-edge features, such as auto-reverse and song seek.
With all this great hardware, of course, I had great software. In 1994, and years before the iPod, carrying my entire music library was virtually impossible. I needed to bring a small batch of CDs with me. In 1994, I probably owned about 200 CD but didn’t travel with more than twelve discs at a time.2 Every car trip required careful curation and anticipation about what my friends and I might want to hear many hours in the future. This might seem inconvenient today, but I really got to know my music back then, especially how good a particular band was beyond their hits.
After college, I found myself listening to music in my car less frequently. Santa Barbara and UCSB were particularly friendly to walking and cycling, and long drives with my friends became a rare thing. That combined with a move to New York City made riding in a car a less common occurrence for me that riding in an airplane. Whenever I get into a car today, I just turn the radio to the local NPR station.
As much as Soundcheck’s bidecennial retrospective on 1994 makes me feel like an old man, it at least confirms that my music is objectively better than anything these kids listen to these days.
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Yes, this is the same guy who drives about 200 miles per year but pedals about 20x that. ↩
I never got the 100-disc binders that held a chunk of every single CD I ever owned. That was a good thing, in retrospect, because at least two of my friends had their big binders stolen from their cars. Those were, without exaggeration, devastating losses. ↩
The other day, I received a letter in the mail from Google. I wasn’t sure if it was related to my Google Apps account, all the unflattering things I say about them, or the fact that I’ve been circulating an image of “street art” that is critical of their surveillance over our online activities.
It turned out that it was none of those things. Once I opened it, I learned that people in my neighborhood of Long Island City have been searching Google for me, and they were just trying to sell me on AdWords.
Your current customers likely search for your business by name (e.g., “Juan Monroy”) and, as a result, your Google listing shows up in their search results.
Prospective customers however tend to search by topic and city (e.g., Flowers “Long Island City”), in which case it’s likely your business won’t show up…
I wonder what business they are referencing. Because I certainly don’t sell flowers! T-shirts, maybe, but not flowers.
