Posts Tagged ‘Books’
December 5, 2010
Are you a poetry fan? Jane Rosenberg LaForge (my wife) and three other New York area writers — Lisa Marie Basile, Britt Gambino and Jim Meirose — will present a free evening of poetry and fiction this Saturday in Chelsea.
Jane is promoting her second chapbook, “Half-Life,” from Big Table Publishing. It is drawn on experiences with cancer in her family (her mother died in November 2009 and her sister in July 2010, while many of these poems were being written and revised). (I wrote last year about Jane’s first chapbook, “After Voices,” now in its second printing, about growing up with a deaf father.)
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Posted in New York, Paper & Ink | Leave a Comment »
Tags: After Voices, Books, Britt Gambino, Half-Life, Jane Rosenberg LaForge, Jim Meirose, Lisa Marie Basile, NYC, Spark Art Center
April 11, 2010
Updated April 21, 2010.
The world probably doesn’t really need another iPad review, does it?
There’s a glut out of them out there.
And I’m not a tech reviewer. I’m a gadget nut, so feel free to discount my enthusiasm by the appropriate percentage. After all, I did pre-order this thing sight unseen so it could be delivered on Day One.
So this post will be impressionistic, just some notes on my first week with the device.
First: It’s fast. Snappy. It makes the iPhone and the iPod Touch seem slow. It makes a Macbook seem slow.
Second: The battery life is amazing. You don’t even think about the battery. I plug it it in every night, and have used it heavily many days. It has never dropped below 50 percent.
Remarkable for an Apple product: It doesn’t get hot — unlike my Macbook Air, or my iPhone, which can get uncomfortable to the touch and sluggish with heavy use. I have often thought that Steve Jobs was trying to brand me with his products. No more.
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Posted in iPhone Apps, Social Media | 5 Comments »
Tags: Amazon, Apple, Apple TV, Books, computers, iPad, iPad apps, iPhone Apps, iPhones, iPod Touch, iPods, iTunes, Kindle, Kindle for iPad, music, NYT, podcasts, Steve Jobs, technology, TiVo, Twitter
April 3, 2010
It’s still syncing.
While I prepare myself for the inevitable post-purchase depression and “why can’t I do that, Mr. Jobs” revelations, here are some unboxing pictures and a video from my Posterous page.
At some point I’ll list the pros and cons. But I’m done with the posting and tweeting today. I doubt there’s much new that I could say about it.
Technology isn’t my beat, so I’ll leave the iPad news and reviews to my colleagues at Bits. (Here’s an earlier post about how I made the purchase decision.)
For me, the iPad is first and foremost a book and media reader. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in iPhone Apps, New York, Paper & Ink | 3 Comments »
Tags: Apple, Books, Collyer brothers, comics, ebooks, iBooks, iPad, Kindle, Kindle for iPad, macs, NYT, Posterous
February 1, 2010
You’ve seen the new toy. You’ve seen the experts debate: Will the Apple iPad “save” newspapers, journalism, book publishing? Will it kill the Amazon Kindle? Is this the death of the laptop, and the PC as we know it? Has Apple just signaled the death of the ultraportable MacBook Air? Will it replace smartphones like the iPhone or Nexus One? Has Apple just pwned another media marketplace — sorry Amazon, Google, Microsoft? Goodbye, netbooks? Farewell, computers?
Blah, blah, blah. Nobody knows the future, so such pronouncements are justifiably viewed as so much hype.
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Posted in iPhone Apps, Moving Images, Paper & Ink, Social Media | 8 Comments »
Tags: Amazon, Apple, Books, computers, e-books, Google, iPad, iphone, iPod, iTunes, laptops, Microsoft, Nexus One, NYT, smartphones, technology
October 25, 2009
Updated, Nov. 15. Time for a plug. I’m pleased to announce that “After Voices,” a poetry chapbook by my wife, Jane Rosenberg LaForge, was released last week by Burning River of Cleveland. Jane has been laboring over these poems for a couple of years. Some people have asked, what is a chapbook? One definition: a short booklet containing poems, ballads or stories. Jane’s chapbook includes 12 poems and an essay arranged around the theme of her father’s deafness. (He is already disputing some of the facts. Fun times!)
Jane plans to read some of the poems at a New York University faculty-student reading in the East Village in December.
A hard copy of the chapbook can be ordered online for $6 a copy from Burning River. A PDF version can be downloaded for free (it includes a bonus poem not in the print edition). It will eventually be available as a digital book in epub format from Project Gutenberg. You can also buy a copy at Visible Voice Books in Cleveland, Housing Works Bookstore Cafe in SoHo, and the McNally-Jackson Bookstore, also in SoHo.
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Posted in New York, Paper & Ink | 3 Comments »
Tags: Adirondack Review, After Voices, Bateau, Books, Burning River, Burnside Review, Cleveland, deafness, Housing Works Bookstore, Jane Rosenberg LaForge, La Petite Zine, Makeout Creek, Morgan Conservatory, Noun Versus Verg, Ottawa Arts Review, Poetry, Tipton Poetry Journal, Visible Voice Books
September 9, 2009
More often than I care to recall, I have impulsively downloaded a fancy new iPhone application, only to have it languish on my phone. That was the inspiration for the first “list of iPhone apps I actually use” last year, after the iTunes store started selling third-party applications.
Since then, the number of new applications has grown rapidly. Now there’s a cottage industry of lists, blogs and podcasts devoted to reviewing applications. Here’s a recent Techcrunch list of the “best” apps, which notes the store had 300 new apps rolling out every day. Here’s a similar post at Gizmodo, which put the total number of apps at more than 74,000. Many of the lists that try to sort out the best applications seem to focus more on flash than substance.
In August, I finally renewed my AT&T contract and upgraded to the iPhone 3GS. It seemed like the right time to reconsider the programs I had loaded onto my phone. Did I actually use them?
Here’s my revised list:
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Posted in Blogging, iPhone Apps, Moving Images, New York, Social Media | 10 Comments »
Tags: 1Password, AIM, Amazon, AOL Radio, Bento, Books, computers, dictionaries, Facebook, games, Gizmodo, Google, iPhone Apps, iPhones, iPods, iTunes, Kindle, Last.FM, macs, Midomi, music, newspapers, NPR, NYC, NYT, O.E.D., Pandora, Posterous, radio, Readdle, remotes, Shakespeare, Shazam, SMS, software, Stanza, Techcrunch, technology, texting, Tweetie, Twitter, Twitterfon, UpNext, Urbanspoon, Wall Street Journal, webcams, WikiHow, Wikipanion, Wikipedia, Yelp
August 9, 2009
Well, this is one cost of early technology adoption. I bought an original Kindle in April 2008, and it has served me well, so I can’t complain too much.
Recently, I noticed a sort of smudge developing in the upper left corner of the screen, even when the machine was turned off. There were also slight streaks of white lines going vertically down the screen, with a washed-out appearance at the top. I could still read books, but it was sort of annoying. I decided to see if Amazon tech support could offer any advice.
I wasn’t looking for a replacement, although I wouldn’t have minded a sort of cash-for-clunkers trade-in discount on a Kindle 2 or a DX. Mainly I was hoping this was an easy problem that they had learned how to fix. If they couldn’t, I would live with it.
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Posted in Blogging, iPhone Apps, Paper & Ink, Social Media | 9 Comments »
Tags: Amazon, Apple tablet, Books, customer service, ebooks, iphone, Kindle, New York Times, Posterous, tech support, Twitter
April 11, 2009
This has not been a good month for my coffee-blogging. We had some distracting news at the office, then a couple of weeks ago, I was laid low by a burning lump of fire in my throat that turned out to be strep. My daughter and eight other kids in her class, plus the teacher and some parents, probably came down with it too. It took a while to shake that, and the cure was in some ways worse than the illness, but I finally seem to be on the mend. At least I got some reading done.
So I wasn’t drinking as much coffee, and I still had quite a supply of the Ecuadorean beans from Whole Foods. About a week ago, though, I stopped by Cafe Grumpy with my daughter and was pleased to see some selections that were right up my alley. This is the first of the two.
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Posted in Coffee! | 2 Comments »
Tags: Blogs, Books, Café Grumpy, Coffee!, espresso, Jura-Capresso Impressa F9 Espresso Machine, NYT
April 5, 2009
I just finished reading “The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century,” by George Friedman, and I hope he is wrong about nearly everything.
His thesis is that we humans don’t have much choice in our international politics, that we are guided by geopolitical considerations, and that armed conflict is inevitable. The book is an odd mix of plausible scenarios and wacky Star Wars fantasies.
Perhaps that is not surprising, coming from a fellow who is the chief intelligence officer and founder of Strategic Forecasting Inc. (Stratfor), a private intelligence agency whose clients include foreign government agencies and Fortune 500 companies (and plain old citizens willing to pay $199 a year for newsletters).
There is a some fresh thinking in the book, but ultimately it suffers from a failure of imagination.
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Posted in Paper & Ink | 3 Comments »
Tags: Anathem, Battlestar Galactica, Books, George Friedman, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Neal Stephenson, Stratfor, The Black Swan, The Long Now, The Next 100 Years
January 7, 2009
I’m happy to report that I finally finished the 900+ page “Anathem” by Neal Stephenson, just four months (!) after starting it. I have to admit that I took breaks to read a few other things.
I previously posted about the difficult, otherworldly vocabulary that Stephenson made up for this book. (For example, the “Reticulum” is similar to what we call the Web or the Internet, though you have to figure that out based on the description of a narrator who is basically a cloistered monk who never uses technology. “Jeejahs” are smart phones or mobile devices of some sort. Videos are “speelies” recorded with “speelycaptors.” Those are some of the neologisms that feel apt. Not all of them do.)
Others have weighed in about the lexicon, and the book’s need for editing, especially in the early chapters (here’s an example from Slashdot, the bulletin board for geeks). And there’s the question of the title, which looks like a typo and calls to mind Ayn Rand’s completely unrelated polemical novel “Anthem,” which Stephenson says he has never read (see video below).
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Posted in Moving Images, Paper & Ink | 2 Comments »
Tags: aliens, American Nerd, Anathem, Any Rand, Arbre, Battlestar Galactica, Books, Buddhism, Clock of the Long Now, concents, Cryptonomicon, Edmund Husserl, geeks, Google, Internet, IT, jeejahs, Kurt Gödel, Neal Stephenson, nerds, quantum physics, Reticulum, Roger Penrose, science fiction, spacecraft, speely, speelycaptor, string theory, uncertainty, video, Web
Are you a poetry fan? Jane Rosenberg LaForge (my wife) and three other New York area writers — Lisa Marie Basile, Britt Gambino and Jim Meirose — will present a free evening of poetry and fiction this Saturday in Chelsea. 
