I would like an invite to Spotify:

I'd appreciate it if any of you can give me a Spotify invitation. I'm already to go, with the Spotify app on my iPad.

iA Writer: Terrific for writing on an iPad:

If you want to draft some writing, or edit what you’ve written, one writing program is far better than all the others: iA Writer, by Information architects. Their program adds one more line to the keyboard, and these keys make all the difference:

Move one word forward or back

- ; :

apostrophe, and smart quote signs

open/close parentheses

cursor keys to move one CHARACTER right or left.

These keys make it so much more easy to use a soft keyboard. All Apple apps should have the option of adding this line of keys. The keyboard keys are still large (leaving relatively small space for the text itself when the keyboard is up), but if you’re at all serious about writing, you know that seeing less text can be a benefit, not a hindrance.

This is the program that turns the iPad into a producer, not just a consumer!

Please note that you’ll find many reviews online complaining that this program does not support smart quotes. Well it does now, unless you’re British.

NFL Madness:

The wild free-agent week for the newly unlocked-out NFL is generating the best preseason publicity the league has ever had. But time is short, and there has been understandable confusion. During a raucous, hastily-called press briefing, the general manager of the Greedbay Packers shamefacedly owned up to his hasty signing of Carlos Beltran to a free agent contract. Taking sharp questions from the press, he insisted that Beltran could still help the team.

In a possibly related story, rumor has it that owners are responding favorably to an unusual proposal for a change in the rules that govern field goals.

Major League Ballplayers are different from You and Me:

I heard the Yankee's play-by-play announcer say: "Granderson's had a perfect day. Two singles, and hit by a pitch."

If a major league pitcher hit me with a hard, ninety-mile-per-hour ball, it would not be a perfect day. Ouch.

Cardamom Water:

Add a pinch of cardamom powder to ice water and mix well. delicious!

A Camry:

I play a license plate anagram game. I apply a rule for generating six letters from license plates with four letters and two digits, and then I try to form a six-letter word from those letters. Recently, I saw a plate that I could not make into a six-letter word, but I was able to form this:
A Camry
Of course, I checked out what kind of car it was:


A Honda Civic.

Chip, Chip, ... (the Mets):

The Mets have dealt their closer to the Brewers, which has the happy result of saving the Mets from having to pay him another $17 million. I heard a lot of analysis about this move today, and the focus was on all that money, but I think that this trade signals something more important.

The Mets brass have given up on winning in the playoffs this year, and they are planning for the future. Here’s how we know that: the Mets have played way above themselves for a long time. On paper, they are barely a .500 team, yet they are holding their own, and better, against some pennant contenders. What this “no name” team has going for them is chemistry. The players have bonded somehow, and they are a self-supporting group. If you want to win, you do not mess with the chemistry.

Trading your closer, when you are not sure how you are going to replace him, definitely messes with the chemistry. So we know that management has given up on this year. And I agree! I’ve seen too many seasons where the Mets played really well till past the trade date, then collapsed. They are not a good team this year. It’s more important to get some help for the future.

The tricky thing for management is to give away some of their players without raising the ire of their fans. So they will make the next deal after the Mets lose enough games to suggest that this years’ bubble is over. If by some miracle the Mets keep winning, I suspect management will sigh and ride the increase in rabid attendance to the end of the season.

Please Invite me to Google+

Please Invite me to Google+ . I'd like to start using it.

And by the way: if you spill your coffee, it's okay to cry over it. Perhaps that's because it has less nutritional value than milk.

Forget about whether the Mets should make an offer to Jose Reyes:

Mets fans and the announcers and columnists who follow the team are having a field day deciding what sort of offer the Mets should make to Reyes. One announcer, using rather colorful language, said the Mets should offer the full $150 million or so for seven years, even though Reyes would not be worth it after about four years, because the first few years would be so exciting.

Forget this speculation. Here’s the bottom line: I’m sure Reyes does not want to re-sign with the Mets. He can play for a much better team next year, and on a better team, he will be a more potent player. Reyes’ current contract with the Mets is a poor one for him, and the Mets’ failure to greatly sweeten it must make Reyes want to play elsewhere, anyway. Trying to keep Reyes is futile.

The Harry Potter Filibuster:

What a strange name, but that’s what Princeton Public Library called its public reading of the first Harry Potter book. They scheduled it for 9:30 a.m. To 7:30 p.m., today, but I believe they finished before six. Many of the readers were children, avid Potter fans themselves, and I shall call this a memorable occasion.

I signed up to read out loud and got the second slot, 9:45 to 10. I dropped by later to see how they were doing, and they asked me to read the 5 p.m. slot, very near the climactic battle of the book. I had to come up with nine voices, and I must confess that I did not distinguish Ron and Harry very well. My voices were:

Harry, Ron, Hermione, Narrator, Snape, McGonagall, Peeves, Neville, and Harry imitating the Bloody Baron.

My first experience with Applecare:

I got a surprising look at the depth of thought that Steve Jobs put into the iPad this week.

When I got my iPad, I was spellbound by the care that went into its design. It is so much prettier than any other computer I have used. Even the packaging was pleasant, and I saved some of the package inserts because I liked their looks. The ease of setting the iPad up and the consistency in its interface have made me a Mac fan.

When I bought the iPad, I decided not to buy another 32GB, in order to buy the Applecare support package. I thought I was buying insurance against some weird hardware problem that Apple would not want to fix for everybody, some strange mistake in the iPad 2 design for which I would want favorable correction terms. I had no idea.

I made my first call to Applecare support because the “Pages” iPad app refused to email a document to me. Pages told me that I needed to specify an email address in “Settings,” and I had done that.

My problem was diagnosed for a while by a support person, and then I was passed to a supervisor. It turned out that the Pages program was telling me the wrong thing. (If you’re curious, Pages gets its email address from the iPad “Mail” program, where at least one address must be defined and turned on.)

The supervisor thanked me for my patience, gave me his phone number, and encouraged me to call him for any kind of problem. In talking to my two Applecare guys, I never had the feeling that they wanted to get me off the phone as soon as they could. And that’s when it hit me:

We know that the iPad has succeeded where all of the previous tablet products failed, because the iPad was conceived as a Media device, something more advanced than a TV set, something that ought to be easy to use like a TV set. There’s a lot of software on iPads, making them somewhat complicated beasts. Apple (make that Steve Jobs) knows that keeping the iPad simple to use requires providing excellent support. And the kind of support I experienced keeps the potential customer base as large as possible, easing the way for many users who are not computer experts.

I knew it would fit:

My mother-in-law firmly believed that they never made anything as good as they used to. I wonder what she would think about my current PDA/Phone carrying case.

When I travel on the NJ turnpike, I always check out those vending sites that sell small leatherette cases. I’m very particular about how I carry my cellphone and my PDA. I want to put them in a double case. The small outside pocket (some say a phone should not be carried too close to your body) is for the phone. The inner pocket has to be large enough for my PDA, and most double cases are not large enough. I also require the case to have a sewn belt loop; not a velcro-closed loop that can fall open and cause me to lose hundreds of dollars-worth of electronics.

My previous case was large enough for my PDA, but it was ostentatiously large. So I was happy to find a much smaller case that looked just the right size. After I bought it, I realized that I had not, as is my usual custom, actually put the PDA in it to make sure it was large enough. Well, I had already bought it. I slung it on my belt and tried to squeeze the PDA in.

I could barely get the zipper over it. It was an incredibly tough fit. “No problem,” I told myself. (I’m an optimist.) “The case will stretch.”

Wow, did it stretch. A few weeks later, I can’t imagine having any trouble with that zipper.

If the case stretched that fast, how long will it last?

The Defective Scrabble Set:

My aunt was, for many years, an addicted Scrabble player. She once devised a sort of Scrabble Solitaire suitable for publishing in newspapers. Her game began with a rack of seven letters, and challenged you to find the best play. Then, in each column, the new board position appeared, and you were challenged to make the best possible play with your current rack, etc. I believe she did persuade a newspaper to run this Scrabble column.

I was an avid teenage player, and she gave me what was, at the time, the best Scrabble game for sale, a beautiful board with elegant plastic pieces.

After I married, I mostly played Scrabble with my father-in-law. We were evenly matched and appreciated each other’s style. When he visited us, of course we used the beautiful set I got from my aunt.

He hated it. There was a defect in the set that I had discovered shortly after I received it, and he also noticed it right away. A Scrabble set has 100 tiles, but mine had 101; there was an extra ‘W’.

I loved the extra W. I hated the situation that arises too often in Scrabble, where you have six or seven vowels and can’t make a decent play anywhere. To me, that W evened the balance.

My father-in-law complained about the extra W. He often insisted on playing without it. One day, the W disappeared. You can draw your own conclusions. I certainly did.

F*%@, F*%@, F*%@ Safari!

I almost think I would rather spend a month in hell than have to use Safari on the iPad. These two make a horrible pair.

This morning, a friend sent me an anguished, beautifully argued plea to vote against a bill in congress, HR 1249, the so-called “America Invents Act”. I sat down at my iPad to forward his argument, with a preface, to my congressman.

Emailing a congressman requires me to fill out a webpage form with many semi-personal details. I did that. Then I selected the appropriate edit window (on the same web page), to write my message. I wrote my intro, and then I went back to the different Safari window with my friend’s argument that I wished to quote. I copied it and returned to the congressional web form, where I discovered that Safari had helpfully forgotten everything I had typed into it.

After I finished pounding my fist on the table, I decided that I had been doing my work in the wrong order. I should FIRST paste what my friend wrote, then fill in the other fields. So I did the paste, and it worked just fine.

Now here’s where Safari and iPad work together to persuade a person to beat his fist into a pulp. There are no cursor keys on the iPad, so how do I “scroll up” to the top of this edit window? Safari responds to finger motions to scroll the entire web page up and down, but not to scroll inside a window.

Damn you, Safari. And Damn your little friend iPad, too.

Aralon: Sword and shadow for iPhone and iPad: How to do it!

If you're an iPhone or iPad user, and you like fantasy computer games, please check out my semi-FAQ at Aralon, Sword and Shadow: The Plan, with various tips and advice. I've collected information from all over the web, and added some tips of my own, such as your best chance to play the Orc Castle (Uthu) without crashing.

There's something about these computer games that only devotees can understand. One person complained in a forum that he had gotten stuck after playing his game for twenty hours. Due to a bug, or perhaps a careless action on his part, it was now impossible to make progress. He summed his situation up as follows: That's twenty hours, wasted!

Someone else commented right back to him: Twenty hours playing any computer game is twenty hours wasted.

There ought to be a law!

I bought a $0.99 app for my iPad this morning. Before buying it, I had to agree to the new and changed terms of the iTunes legal agreement. This legal agreement is presented on my iPad as a series of FORTY-ONE PAGES, each of which requires scrolling to read. How many hours am I expected to study this agreement before accepting it? Sheesh.

It could be worse. These ‘agreements’ to use software used to appear onscreen in tiny type, sometimes laid out so that you had to scroll horizontally to read EACH LINE; and not accessible to copy-and-paste. Double Sheesh.

Companies ought to be required to make it easy to review the legalese we’re agreeing to before buying or downloading software. If you weren’t born yesterday, you know that some of these agreements bury nasty terms in them, such as claiming ownership of content that you upload.

Finally, no one should be allowed to write a contract that says that the other party agrees to any future changes the contractor wishes to make. “Real” contracts generally say the exact opposite: “This is the only contract between X and Y, and it cannot be changed without written consent of both X and Y.” Triple Sheesh.

When people say that, it’s always a lie:

There’s a coarse joke about how when you hear a certain statement, it’s always a lie. I’ve discovered that modern technology has given us a new statement that, when you hear it, is also a lie. This lie has probably been around for over a hundred years, but it can’t be much older than that, and it has become popular only recently. Here’s the setting:

You are listening to, or viewing, a podcast or some recorded production.

Somebody does, or says, something embarrassing. Then you hear the lie, and it is always a lie:

Don’t worry, I’ll edit that out.

Wilpon Juices up the Mets:

The Mets’ owner, Fred Wilpon, recently did the unthinkable (and, apparently, the unpardonable): he criticized three of his better players in a printed interview. Fred was forced to eat crow, using the phone to apologize to the players. Worse yet, he was told to apologize by phone, since he would not have been welcome in person.

But guess what?

Two of those players, Jose Reyes and Carlos Beltran (until Beltran was injured; I told them to trade him before his next injury) were obviously stung by Wilpon’s criticism, and have been playing their best baseball of the year to prove him wrong. The third player, the gracious David Wright, can’t do anything to prove Wilpon wrong until he’s fully recovered from an injury.

Just one Lichee:

While doing some major shopping today, I decided to buy a Lichee. They are relatively expensive, but they make a great treat. I memorized the code – 4309 – because I was sure the cashier would otherwise have to look it up.

The young woman who packed my groceries was obviously the daughter of Chinese parents. She teased me about my Lichee:
“Don’t you want to buy more than one? After you eat it, won’t you want more?”

Ehhh, she was right.

I went to a big, local cinema to see and hear Wagner's Die Walkure performed 'live' at the Met (CON):

It seems so great to get a Metropolitan Opera Experience close to your own home, for only $18. But I may not ever do it again. The crucial problem?

It was too loud. The tenor made my whole head buzz with his resonance. After the first act, I politely asked, and they turned the volume down. It was bearable, but still too loud. A modern orchestra can be unbearably loud in a theater with good acoustics, but this was ridiculous, and it is mostly out of the movie patron’s control.

It was too long. There were two twenty minute intermissions, and in addition, there were interviews and explanations that greatly added to the fun, but let’s face it: 5.5 hours is too long for even a long opera like Die Walkure.

It was not real. In order to record the singers well, they must have been miked. (One reviewer noted that the sound changed when two singers stood close together, suggesting to him an interaction between their mikes.) Opera singers train to project their voices in vast theaters against the orchestral sounds. I would rather be sitting at the Met and know the quality of each voice, without the fake power that microphones can bestow on singers.

It was ‘produced’. This was not exactly a live performance. The video was taken from a live performance at the Met, one in which, memorably, the opening curtain was delayed 30 minutes for a computer glitch. But there were sudden cuts in the camera work, and here’s my bottom line: I want someone to tell me how this opera video was made, so that I don’t have to suspect that they made some edits to correct less-than-perfect moments. In any case, it must have been a challenge to edit together the sound from all its microphoned audio sources, and the result could be somewhat artificial. The interviews all sounded as if they were done during the live performance, but must I really believe that? Some of the artists seemed awfully relaxed at having their own intermission time eaten up by interviews. Again, I’d like to know how this wonderful video was really put together.

The video did not quite manage to do justice to the orchestral sound. I suspect that is the result of editing together the miked singers with the orchestra. One reviewer complained that the singers seemed to have ‘3D’ sound, but the orchestra was ‘2D’, that is, sonically flat, when the whole orchestra played. (The quiet sections that featured solos by orchestral players were fantastic.)

In sum, I’d like to attend another of these ‘live’ opera videos if I knew they were reasonably true to an actual performance, and assured not to be too loud. I want to know how I’m being entertained.

I went to a big, local cinema to see and hear Wagner's Die Walkure performed 'live' at the Met (PRO):

Gosh, what a spectacle. The singers for this performance got great reviews, and I thought they were wonderful. The staging had its fascinating moments, and it's notwworthy that this particular stage equipment enabled the Valkyries to sing their parts near the audience. Apparently, traditional staging methods put the Valks partially behind a curtain, so they cannot sing solo, and have to double their voice parts. The Ride of the Valkyries is spectacular theater, due to Wagner's wonderful voice writing.
This video was Opera with subtitles and closeups! And the actor-singers (with one exception) were up to the kind of acting that makes closeups worthwhile. This astonishing opera is drama, drama, drama, with great singing and music to set the moods. There was great doubt when subtitles were first introduced into opera, and this was my first experience of them. Without them, I would have had a good idea of what was going on; with them, I knew how to interpret every gesture and vocal subtlety. I think I would want subtitles even for an opera in English.
Tomorrow, I will post my gripes.

Holiday Weekend confuses the MLB? (Major League Baseball):

It's Memorial Day Weekend. No work Monday, for many of us, so we can afford to stay up late Sunday night. And what does the MLB do? It schedules day games on Sunday, and night games (as usual) on Monday. They ought to schedule the other way 'round.

I didn’t know ...

Now that I have an Ipad2, I have entered Apple’s world of Gestures. At my age, it’s not easy to learn lots of new gestures that do cool things, but from reading the manual, I know that there are some great time-saving two-finger and three-finger salutes gestures. I’ve been through this before with a gesture-enabled fingerpad, and my approach, which doesn’t work very well, is to try to learn one just new gesture at a time.

I feel a lot less frustrated today, because I found a fine essay by Donald A. Norman and Jakob Nielsen that rips this new gesture world to pieces. To whet your appetite, they point out that there’s no consistency across apps to help you learn gestures; and that there’s no way to SEE when the capability of gestures is present. Please read the essay itself for its many memorable points. Here’s a quote:

Whenever we discus these examples with others, we invariably get two reactions. One is "gee, I didn't know that." The other is, "did you know that if you [do] this (followed by some exotic swipe, multi-fingered tap, or prolonged touch) that the following happens?" Usually it is then our turn to look surprised and say "no we didn't know that." This is no way to have people learn how to use a system.

You know, I think I would prefer a gesture-based system that uses the Microsoft Kinect technology. Then we could we could replace [alt+F4] with the most common one-finger salute.

WPRB Playlists for my programs at 6:00 A.M. on Tuesdays, etc....

The WPRB playlists are back where they belong, at WPRB.COM. Click on one of the Playlist alternatives. You can even use the playlist SEARCH feature to find specific pieces, recordings and (often) playtimes.

Dropped calls: iPhone and Verizon:

Do you remember, when we heard that there was going to be a Verizon-enabled iPhone, we heard stories all from over the press about how Verizon would probably drop just as many calls as AT&T? The jist of this claim was that the dropped calls were mostly Apple’s fault, not AT&T’s so there was no way for Verizon to do any better. There were supposed to be bugs in Apple’s call software, or maybe hardware, that AT&T had taken the blame for, all these years.

I never believed this story for a minute. (And to their credit, neither did many people who were covering the iPhone story.) I made a note to wait a few months and blog about it, when the evidence was in, although I was sure I knew what the evidence would be. Here’s what I expected: Verizon besting AT&T in dropped calls.

Common sense argued that if Apple’s software was causing lots of dropped calls, they had plenty of time, and loads of incentive, to do something about it. I had only two questions about this story:

• Who planted it?
• Why were the news people so gullible about it?

Playlist for May 17, 2011, 2011 at 6 a.m. to 8:30, Music on WPRB princeton, 103.3 fm and WPRB.COM (streaming around the world):

This is the playlist for my radio program of May 17, 2011, 6:00 A.M..
My first such Classical Playlist (with an explanation) is here.


The actual list will get filled in as I broadcast, from 6:00 A.M.

Playlist for Tobias on WPRB, 103.3 FM and WPRB.COM, for May 17, 2011
Composer	Title	Ensemble	Conductor	Soloists	Album ID	Starting time
Rachmaninov, Sergei	Symphonic Dances for two pianos, Op. 45	n/a	n/a	Emanuel Ax (pno #2), Yefim Bronfman (pno #1)	Sony SK 61767	6:03
Debussy, Claude	En Blanc et Noir	n/a	n/a	Ursula Oppens (pno #1), Jerome Lowenthal (piano #2)	Cedille cdr 90000	6:37
Anweiler, Andrzej	Diversions for two clarinets	Chicago Clarinet Trio	n/a	Larry Combs (cl) & Julie DeRoche (cl)	Albany TROY1211	6:56
Saint-Saëns, Camille	Piano Concerto #4 in c, Op. 44	Orchestre de Paris	Serge Baudo (cond)	Aldo Ciccolini (pno)	EMI 69443	7:06
Duparc, Henri	Songs: L'invitation au Voyage (Baudelaire), Extase (lahor), La vie antérieure (Baudelaire)	n/a	n/a	Sarah Walker (mezzo), Roger Vignoles (pno)	Hyperion CDA 66323	7:36
Lansky, Paul	Composition Project for Seniors	Computer-generated	n/a	n/a	Bridge 9210	7:54
Ginastera, Alberto	Popol Vuh: The Mayan Creation, Op.44	BBC National Orchestra of Wales	Gisele Ben-Dor	n/a	Naxos 8.570999	8:03

Locked Keys:

In 1994 I had a consulting job that required me to commute east, all across New Jersey, an hour each way every day. After an accident that totaled my then current car (a woman returning from her chemo appointment made an injudicious left turn), we got a brand new Honda Accord for me to commute in. The car was a few weeks old and I was coming home on a Friday afternoon. On Fridays, I always left early enough to get home well before the start of the Sabbath, at which time I could no longer drive. I was always hyper about making sure I got home early on Fridays.

I stopped halfway, at my favorite gas station, an indie place that sold off-brand gas at low prices. I pulled up at the pump, got out of the car and closed the door, locking my keys inside. The motor was still running.

That’s a nightmare scenario, except for one thing. The gas station employees were not the least bit worried. One of them reached up and felt along the low roof of the gas station office. He pulled out a long tool designed for one thing: to unlock card doors. He shoved it down between the driver’s seat window and the outside of the door, fished round a bit and .... he dropped it. The tool disappeared inside my car door. The motor was still running.

I stood there with my heart in my mouth while the gas station owner made a few phone calls. Soon he announced there was nothing to worry about. Fifteen minutes later, a guy drove up, looking very much like the same sort of foreigner as the gas station employees. He unlocked my car with a similar tool, got the other tool out of my door, teased us all, and drove off. I got home about thirty minutes later than expected, feeling very lucky.

Trade Beltran (the Mets):

Carlos Beltran recently hit three home runs in one game. He’s healthy and he’s batting well, a great asset to the Mets.

The Conventional Wisdom about the Mets is stark and simple. They are not good enough to win their division. They are not good enough to win the Wild Card spot in the playoffs. Teams in their situation trade off good players during the pennant race. In July, as the trading deadline approaches, some team that is in a pennant race will give up a lot for Beltran. The Mets are expected to wait for a summer auction and trade Beltran away to the most desperate bidder.

I disagree. Trade Beltran now! It’s too much to hope that he will play like this all the way through July; he's at risk to get injured again. The time to trade him is now.

When you leave a phone message, remember: You are Acting!

When you leave a phone message, or when you record your own OGM, it's time to get dramatic. Emphasize, and be clear and to the point, or else you'll mumble the most important part, or even a digit.

It makes me so sad to hear a message, or an OGM, that just cannot be understood. I once needed to reach a doctor's emergency line. The emergency number played a message about how to call the doctor's weekend number. That number was just thrown away in a rapid soft voice at the end of the message, and I think I was lucky to be able to hear eight of the nine digits. I reached the doctor by calling almost all ten of the possible numbers, in the course of which I got to talk to some very nice people, but that wasn't important then.

If your message includes a phone number, speak it twice! It doesn't matter how clearly you enunciate your digits; what matters is that a moment of noise can obliterate one of them. Give your listener a second chance.

My Wedding Ring is off my finger, and my skin is recuperating, but...

I hadn't really thought about it, but I have a nervous habit of rapping out interesting rhythms with my wedding ring. I tap it on staircase railings and lots of other reverberant surfaces. Currently, I'm not wearing it. I haven't lost the rapping habit, but it's really silly right now: I tap the side of my ring finger on hard surfaces, and nothing happens.

Playlist for May 10, 2011 , 2011 at 6 a.m., Music on WPRB Princeton, 103.3 fm and WPRB.COM (streaming around the world):

My first such Classical Playlist (with an explanation) is here.


The actual list will get filled in as I broadcast, from 6:00.

Playlist for Tobias on WPRB, 103.3 FM and WPRB.COM, for May 10, 2011
Composer	Title	Ensemble	Conductor	Soloists	Album ID	Starting time
Asrael Symphony, Op. 27	Suk, Josef	Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra	Libor Pesek	n/a	VC 91221	6:04
Schumann, Robert	Liederkreis, op. 39 (Eichendorff)	n/a	n/a	Elisabeth Schwartzkopf (sopr), Geoffrey Parsons (pno)	lp: angel 37043	7:10
Rachmaninov, Sergei	Suite #1 for two pianos, op. 5, fantasie-tableaux	n/a	n/a	Emanuel Ax (pno), Yefim Bronfman (pno)	Sony SK 61767	~7:37
Ravel, Maurice	Concerto for the Left Hand in D	Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra	Leonard Slatkin	Alicia de Larrocha (pno)	RCA BMG 60985	8:02