Dear Apple

Thank you for your recent emails suggesting that I get my mother an iPod Touch for Mother's Day.  Were it not for your almost daily reminders, I would not actually have been aware that Mother's Day was approaching, or that I needed to be planning gifts for both my parents (as I'll be out of town by Father's Day).  I've been quite busy on the road and thinking of days in terms of load ins and load outs, and completely oblivious to weekends, birthdays or national holidays.  Actually I'm turning 30 in a few days, and the most I can tell you about that date is that we have performances of The Spy at 2 and 8, with a seminar prior to the matinee.  So you can see how I greatly appreciate your reminders that I need to get a gift for my mom.

However, while my mother is a Mac user and might have an iPhone except that AT&T sucks at her house, I don't believe that the iPod Touch is the ideal gift for her.  She's not much of a music lover -- I think she still has yet to spend all of an iTunes gift certificate I got for her several years ago -- and I don't imagine she'd enjoy watching videos or TV shows on such a small screen.  Personally, I don't see the point of an iPod Touch for anyone who doesn't intend to use it first as an iPod.  I would like someday to be able to get her an inexpensive Macbook, as she would truly use that, but this would be exceedingly more difficult if I now spent $300 on a gift she won't really use.  And P.S. Mr. or Ms. Apple Marketing Person, I have a feeling you have a larger and more regular income than I do and can afford to drop $300 on a Mother's Day gift -- and then presumably match that gift a month later when Father's Day rolls around.  Well good for you.  

In brief, I appreciate that you're looking out for my mother, and for my own preparedness, but the next time you feel the need to send me 5 or more emails suggesting I buy a specific gift for someone, please pick something more appropriate.  Thanks!
Love, KP

My Newfound Love of OmniFocus

Among my favorite types of computing applications has always been the organizer/checklist/outline kind of app. Back in my PDA days, the Palm apps Bonsai and ShadowPlan competed for my heart with each new update. When I got a Mac it came with a version of OmniOutliner which I loved a lot, but alas because it was one of those "came-with-the-Mac" things, as soon as I tried to install a new update it broke my fragile registered version, and I was pissed about it and refused to pay for it, so it was gone (I'm currently having that relationship with ComicLife).

The other problem I have with tasks in general is that the default Apple apps have a really stupid way of handling them, or at least stupid to me, growing up with Palm's big four apps: Datebook, Contacts, To-Dos and Memo. Apple seems to hate to-dos and memos, so much so that after what seems like centuries in technological time, we may soon finally be seeing them sync between iCal, Mail and the iPhone. What, I ask, was the damn point of using them at all until now? First I stopped using tasks, because I could never get them to sync properly between iCal and my Treo. So I just wrote everything as a note. Now as an iPhone user my notes don't sync with anything (???!!!!WTF??!!), and yet I still write everything as a note. Occasionally I will email that note to myself if I really need it in another format.

So of course I looked to the App Store to see what the third party developers had come up with that might serve as a basic tasks app. I honestly wanted a basic tasks app -- a list and a bunch of giant checkboxes. I tried, I really did. But at the time the basic apps were either ugly, overpriced, or reported buggy and lacking basic features. Who knows, since there are no free trials. But the one that sounded the best to me was the most complicated of all -- OmniFocus. At $20, it's one of the more expensive apps in the App Store, but that was back in the day when an average game was $10, so it didn't seem as expensive to me then as it might now when everything else is 99 cents.

Using OmniFocus brought some kind of order to my life. I use it sometimes for shopping lists, generally more of the long-term stuff, not like "what I need to get from Duane Reade in 3 hours," which is usually a straight list. I write down things I want to work on with my computer, like reinstalling Parallels, which I forgot to do the last time I was home; and things I need to pack for the next leg of the tour, or what I hope to accomplish during my down time on the next load-in day. I also have a special project for fight call, which is really not what OmniFocus is designed to do, but I tried it anyway. With both Henry V and The Spy, we have a rather extensive fight call, running through distinct sections of fight choreography with different actors. There is a standard order which we have developed for that, and especially because we perform The Spy so infrequently, Nick and I needed a way to keep track of that order and make sure we've hit all the proper scenes. So I have a project for Fight Call and a sub-project for each show, and inside each are the actions representing each individual fight and the actors needed. I'm not sure exactly what app Nick uses for his list, but he has it on his Blackberry. This allows both of us to open our phones at the top of fight call and Nick runs the current fight while I can let the actors know who is up next and which scene it is, and make sure they have their weapons ready when it's their turn. This is sort of a recurring checklist rather than a regular list of tasks, and the blending of the two types of lists is kind of weird to me, but I think OmniFocus can be made useful for things like this, or prop checklists, with a little work.

Anyway, I was very happy with my purchase. Of course it's designed to sync with the desktop version of the app. That is, if you're willing to pay $80(!!??!!WTF??!!) for it. It's kind of all or nothing. There's not a way to say "Gee I'd like to be able to see and edit my OmniFocus file on a desktop machine" without fully committing to using the software to run your life. I'm not sure exactly what happened to me, I think it was a conversation over drinks with a few of my colleagues about organization and task lists that led me to question if the fact that my technology has failed me, and is driving me closer and closer to having to etch my tasks on tablets, might someday result in me screwing something up. I've done OK with this seat-of-the-pants way I've been running my life and career with the occasional iCal appointment (with or without an alarm) to remind me to do things, or with a plain-text list in my iPhone's notepad. But really, how far I have fallen since the days when there was a checklist for home and shopping, and work stuff was laid out in fancy outlines with multi-part projects and due dates and things!

So I decided -- by way of writing an action in OmniFocus on my iPhone -- that when I got a chance I would download the 14-day trial of OmniFocus desktop. I have been using it for about two days, and so far I am hooked. It's got an even steeper learning curve than the iPhone version, but the larger screen in some ways makes the relationship between the different views and types of data clearer. I've also been watching some of the introductory videos on the website. After that, I discovered a great set of video podcasts called ScreenCastsOnline, which do in-depth screencasts of popular Mac apps. I've only watched a couple, but they have tons available that I want to see. They also offer podcast subscriptions in HD or iPhone-compatible sizes. I sense this will be a new favorite podcast of mine. You can get the links to either of these feeds on their website here.

In all, I've been having fun trying to think of every little thing I need to accomplish and entering it into OmniFocus and categorizing it. I think I'll be much more efficient using the desktop app since the majority of what I need to accomplish either requires me to be at my computer, or in an environment where my computer is out. This way, the iPhone app, which is a little more cumbersome to use due to the fact that it can't run in the background, is only really needed when I'm out and about. More thoughts to come as this experiment goes on...

My Week in Computing

The biggest event of my week was yesterday when we visited the King of Prussia Mall in Pennsylvania. As befitting a giant mall, of course there is an Apple Store. I decided to take my chances on a walk-in visit to the Genius Bar to see if anything could be done about my Macbook Pro battery.

A little background, because I don't bitch about my battery nearly enough for you to have known it was going on: my computer is not quite two years old, and its second battery has withered and died. The first battery lasted pretty much a year exactly, before the battery life got to a point where it was really negating the purpose of having a laptop (somewhere around a half hour). I probably had a case for premature failure, but I just bought a new one, and was happy.

Cut to ten months later. While the battery life on the second one had not become quite so brief (maybe an hour to an hour and a half), the battery was all confused. Diagnostic programs reported the battery health at 40% after 90-something charge cycles, which based on my perusal of the Apple Support forums, is way worse than a lot of people who were able to get their batteries replaced. Worst of all, instead of simply dying quickly, it was misreporting its charge, so that the computer would show it maybe 30% full, and instead of showing a low battery warning or forcing the computer to sleep, it would completely shut off without warning, which is, um, terrible, in so many ways. It had just started doing this before the logic board failure, so when the computer died I thought maybe the battery was not to blame after all, but the problem continued after the repair.

While my computer is sadly without Apple Care, the battery is less than a year old, and thus has its own warranty. It's clearly indicated on the receipt, which I made sure to have on my iPhone in PDF format before going to the store.

So I walked into the store and was able to get an appointment right away, and within 5 minutes was talking to the genius. He booted my computer from an old iPod nano which had some diagnostic software on it (as I tried to stifle my excitement at this idea of using my old nano as an 8GB flash drive), and after a few seconds, the screen popped up with this big red box with the word "BAD" in it in huge letters (artist's rendering above). It was really comical. Well that settled that! I showed him the PDF including the warranty date, signed some papers and walked away with a brand new battery. Between the logic board and the battery I feel like I have a brand new Mac.

Right now I'm using my days off to be a good little girl and train the battery properly. It's probably going to want to be shut down soon -- oops, there goes the warning -- so bye!

Bag Review: Booq Python Pack

It all started under the truck.

This is me, in St. Louis, being cute and acting like I'm pulling the truck. Oh, so funny! What a great Facebook picture! But this fun Facebook picture did not come without sacrifices. As we had just left the bus, I had my usual computer backpack on my back, and I specifically left it on for this picture, hoping it would sort of look like I had some kind of harness on helping me to pull the truck. Well what ended up happening was that all the grease under the trailer (which I assume is what makes it able to slide onto the tractor so easily) got all over my bag. I mean all over. If you have not crawled around under a truck, I don't think you can conceive of this much grease. At first I thought my bag might be a total loss, but over the two or three days in St. Louis, I decided to clean it, with a variety of products suggested by my colleagues. I had some success with dishwashing detergent, but the bag was still stained and vaguely slimey. I bought a cute Jansport sling-style bag in the college bookstore to use until my bag either dried out or was given up on, and while I'm glad I have that bag for other uses, it was never big enough to replace my primary computer bag (which was a Victorinox laptop backpack that I can't even find a picture of anymore.) My bag had these kind of cool rotatable straps that were connected to a flexible plastic plate inside the bag. The plate had started cracking, and I was growing concerned that one day the whole thing might crack off and the bag would become a useless pile of jello. So I was starting to keep my eyes open for a suitable replacement. You may know, I'm a bag whore -- I'll buy a bag for any specific purpose or situation, but my computer bag almost never satisfies me, because it must be able to do everything. So I stick with the same one for a long time, not because I'm being frugal or rational, but because I rarely find one I find acceptable for such an important job.

All this to say, this is not just any bag review of some bag I saw that I thought might be cool to try. This is the decision to replace the bag, the one that in a few cubic inches allows me to bring my stage managementy goodness wherever I go -- safely, comfortably, and with the ability to fit and organize every item that I deem must be with my person at all times.

Needless to say, I did a lot of research. One major factor that immediately excluded a lot of bags is that I refuse to buy a bag with a dark or black interior. There is no good reason that the interior fabric of a bag should make it difficult to find things inside. There aren't that many companies that take this seriously, and Booq stood out as one of the few that had an obvious understanding of the benefit of a brightly-colored interior.

Booq is a small company that seems to aim their products at Mac users without exactly excluding others. I'm guessing the reason for this is that their M.O. seems to be that they make really really expensive bags. Really nice, really thought out, really expensive bags. And the mentality of the average Mac user is probably more in line with that philosophy of "Yeah I spent a whole lot of money on it, but look, it's awesome!"

They seem to have a lot of cool bags for different purposes. What I wanted most in mine was capacity and organization for lots of small accessories, while not being too huge for my small body. I found the Python Pack most to my liking. It's designed for photographers, and comes with a matching camera case that has dividers which can be arranged to fit camera, lenses, and other accessories, and then the whole case slips into the bottom of the main compartment. The idea as best I can tell is that you have your laptop, accessories, memory cards, and camera gear, and then a little room for some extra stuff. I wasn't so interested in the camera bag, but the size of the spacious compartment, and the many pockets and slots for storage appealed to me, so I gave it a try. Because it doesn't seem to be carried in stores, I had to make something of a leap of faith. Thankfully, I ordered it from ebags.com, who I've always had good luck with, and who happen to have a generous return policy, so if I decided that this bag I paid $300 for, sight unseen, was not the perfect bag for all my needs, I could return it.

Due to my laptop dying on me, it's taken me longer to finish this review than I had intended, which is good because I have had more time to truly live with the bag. I am still completely happy with my purchase, and this is definitely going to be my main bag for a while. Now on to the details.

List of Pockets and Compartments
I'm a little too happy to have Photoshop back, so I made a fancy list. Do you hate me? I hate me a little. Click for full size.

I didn't get so fancy for this one. There's just a pocket on each shoulder strap. Because the straps get bent around your body, I wouldn't really advise putting anything in them that might not like getting bent. I usually keep gum in them. It would be good for an iPod smaller than an iPhone.

The right-side flap has a lot more little pockets than the other side. I keep things like my computer's remote, a few thumb drives, my camera (not shown unfortunately because I was taking the picture with it), and some assorted cables. There are two pen slots, but neither is big enough for a chunky pen or pencil, and one of the slots is really only appropriate for a standard #2 pencil. As a stage manager and fan of mechanical pencils, this is pretty useless.

Basic exterior view. Henry V luggage tag not included!

PROS:

Very nice quality construction. The fabric, zippers, seams and pockets feel sturdy. They're also kind of sexy. The spandex-like material on some of the pockets, which is also functional for its elastic effect, and the magnetic closure on the flaps inside the main compartment, are just pleasant to use.

Rubbery base, which wraps around onto the back. It not only protects the bag from whatever may be on the ground, it provides a little traction on the back to keep the bag from sliding around.

Orange interior -- easy to find things. Unfortunately the large side pockets have a partially black interior, which sucks a lot, but I suppose due to the construction of the bag it probably couldn't be avoided.

It has waist and sternum straps -- and just as important, they are removable. I use the sternum strap a lot. I originally took it out on the road with the waist straps stowed in a pocket. But since I never used them, I now travel without them altogether.

Comfortable straps

CONS:

Overall most of the pockets are too tight. What I mean is there are tons of pockets, but it doesn't feel like much thought went into what happens when there are contents in them. Suddenly they are very small and many of the little pockets overlap, so when one is filled, the one in front of it becomes almost impossible to get anything into. This is helped a bit by the fact that many of the pockets are made of a spandex-like material, so they expand when things are in them. The ones that are not made of this material have very little give.

The two slash pockets on the front are so thin, small, and strangely shaped, I'm not sure what is intended to go in them. Right now I have my business cards, a pack of gum, and my Advil/Tylenol box.

The camera case is too big to get in and out of the bag easily.

Camera Case

The camera case is really too big for the bag. Even with all the interior pockets empty, the case has to be forced just to get through the opening of the bag. Also, it's too tall to have it sitting in the bottom of the bag and still be able to get a binder upright above it (you can kind of fit one diagonally, but it's awkward.) I try to travel with my script in my bag as little as possible, but to be unable to makes me uneasy. While experimenting with this, I discovered that my printer (Canon i70) does indeed fit sideways in the bag, just barely, which helps justify using the camera case in certain situations. Case, printer, script and laptop is never going to happen, though.

I'm not a photographer, so I really had no use for the case, but I thought it might be fun to play with the provided partitions and use it to hold other goodies of an electronic nature. On my first attempt I came up with this:

It holds most of the gaming peripherals I travel with on the road: mouse, USB hub, and gamepad, as well as my backup hard drive. I brought the case on this leg of the tour, and it was a stupid idea. It takes up way too much space for its usefulness. Keeping it in the bag on a daily basis is not a good use of space, and the important stuff, like my mouse and backup drive, live perfectly well in the pockets within the main compartment of the bag itself -- pockets which ironically can't be filled when the camera case is in the bag.

At any rate, the case would definitely be useful to bring along in more casual situations where I would not need to carry a binder. For an overnight trip, for instance, there would be just enough room left in the bag for some clothes and other small items.
Here's how I set up the dividers for my HD and gaming stuff (that's mouse on the left, HD top center, USB hub upper right, and gamepad at the bottom.)

Below is a picture of the bag with the camera case in it, and my printer on top.

Commuter Report:

My first commute with the bag went surprisingly well. All I had in it was my laptop and the accessories I permanently carry (which is a lot of stuff). The bag was very well balanced, and as a result felt much lighter than it was. My morning train was pretty packed -- I got a seat, but I was crammed in, so it was a good opportunity to check how well the bag can be contained on one's lap without spilling over into someone else's personal space. While it is much more rigid than a normal backpack, it can still be squeezed into a smaller footprint if need be. The sturdy handle on the top is also nice. It's big, padded, and strong enough to really be used to drag the bag around with a lot of heavy stuff in it.

World Traveler Report:
The bag has been nice to fly with. Again I was nervous about the fact that it's kind of rigid, but I have found it fits beneath the seats of every plane I've been on, including some tiny puddle jumpers. On a couple it has been really tight, though. It does fit in the overhead compartments well, too, if you can tame the straps from going everywhere. When I fly I tend to take the little tiny electronic crap out of my bag as much as possible so the TSA people don't freak out and have to look at all of it. On my first flight with this bag, I didn't really do that, and sure enough it had to be hand searched. But because there are enough pockets for everything to have its proper place, that didn't take long.

Work Report:
I really love the fact that the bag naturally stands upright. It just makes getting into it easier. The rigidity is also nice since you don't have to dig around, everything is exposed. I keep my laptop charging cable in the inner pocket on the flap, which makes it very heavy. When the bag is largely empty and the charger is still in the pocket, it does have a tendency to fall over, but that probably serves me right for packing it that way. The handle on the top is very sturdy for wrestling with the bag and dragging it under my desk, into the junk bunk on the bus, or anywhere I need it to go.

In Conclusion:
I have no regrets about buying this bag. It's very expensive, but so far it's been worth it, as I haven't seen another bag that meets my needs so well.

And finally, here's a view of the bag carrying a theoretical load of two large scripts, my printer, and computer (for those who really care about the distinction, that was my 15" Powerbook standing in for the picture, my Macbook Pro was busy doing something -- it's a little bit longer and thinner than the PB.) You can also see one of the padded inserts that comes with the bag, so that it can fit Macbooks from 13" (where you would use both pads) to 15" (with one pad) to 17" (no pads needed).

You can see in some of the other pictures that I have an inner sleeve in the laptop slot. That is one I just bought, also made by Booq, although it's not particularly marketed as an accessory for this bag. It's their Taipan Skin sleeve, which comes in a couple colors. The black one pretty much matches this bag. It has three little rubbery stripes sewn on it, which give it a little more protection and grip. The zipper wraps around two sides of the bag, so you can take the computer out horizontally or vertically. There are also two zippers. I have the medium model, designed for the 15" MacbookPro. If you're curious, Booq makes it clear that it fits both current (unibody) and previous-gen MBPs. Mine is previous-gen, and the fit is very snug, but not too snug. I don't have a current-gen model to test it with, so I can't say for sure how it would fit, but I'd guess it wouldn't be swimming in it. It's a little tight to just slip the computer in when it's inside the laptop slot in the bag, but I like traveling with a sleeve because it allows me to carry the laptop around by itself with some protection, when it's overkill to take my whole bag, such as running into the theatre for a minute from the bus, or going up to the booth during a show.

Pics below:

On Apple Repair

I am typing this from my Macbook Pro. If you've been following my continuing adventures, you will know that last Friday, a week ago, a day that will live in infamy, I opened my computer at the theatre and found that the graphics had crapped out. This was in Phoenix. Since we were leaving Phoenix Sunday, I decided to wait until we arrived in Tucson on Monday (which also has an Apple Store) before taking my poor electronic friend to the Genius Bar to see just how screwed I was.

Monday morning at 11AM, I went in, and was saddened to be told the logic board needed to be replaced, and inconveniently, this graphics failure doesn't happen to be the same Nvidia graphics failure that would have offered me a free out-of-warranty repair, it's just one that looks exactly like it. Now I've heard horror stories of logic board replacements that cost more than a new computer. I was really surprised to be quoted about $350 for said repair. Considering I don't even like the current version of the MBP (mostly due to the glossy screen) I was far happier to pay a relatively small amount to get my current computer back rather than have to buy a newer one. So I counted myself lucky, and bid farewell to my friend for a while. Because we're only in Tucson for a week, and the repair was estimated at 4-6 days turnaround, I felt it unwise to have it sent back to Tucson, so reluctantly I gave the Acting Company's office as the return address. I expected it to arrive today (Friday) or maybe Monday, and then I would pick it up first thing Tuesday morning when I got home on vacation.

Then yesterday morning I awoke around 9AM, and grabbed my now-incredibly-important iPhone off the nightstand to check my email. I had an email from our office manager in New York, saying my computer had arrived, and did I want it shipped out to me, or would I pick it up? Well I had every intention of keeping it simple and picking it up when I got to New York, but I never imagined it would be there Thursday morning. I counted, "Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday..." and made a quick calculation that perhaps the cost of overnighting an object of such value, while excessive if it were anything else in the box, might be worth the benefits of having my computer for four and a half days when I otherwise wouldn't have it. So I asked for it to be sent to our hotel, and it arrived during our morning matinee. So far everything appears to be fine, although it's hard to tell because the internet here at the Hotel Arizona is an embarrassment to the entire hospitality industry.

Anyway, I have never had a computer so utterly crap out on me in my life (well once, in 1993, and it was a Packard Bell, and it sucked). It has always been my absolute nightmare to have such a catastrophic failure while out on the road. And I am so impressed at how smoothly the process went to get it fixed, at every step of the way. Like most things Apple, it just works. Make an online appointment at the Genius Bar, show up, they tested it on site, took some basic information, and sent it off for me. I see now from my receipt that came back with the machine, the repair center in Texas received it the following day, and repaired it that same day. Two days later it was in New York first thing in the morning. For a computer out of warranty to need the replacement of its most essential part, and to be processed so quickly, and have it only cost about $350 including tax, is pretty amazing. I hope never to have to go through it again, and I know there are horror stories out there, but I feel really good about how it all went, and God forbid I should ever have something like this happen again in my computing life, I will at least feel like Apple will make the process go as easily as such a huge inconvenience can be.

So now I'm back, and can get about the business of catching up on my tour blog, and my big review of my new computer bag.

Oh, and P.S. -- bravo to the iPhone. I can't believe a person as geeky as myself could survive for a week without a computer and not go completely insane. This was only made possible by the fact that the iPhone provides so much of the essential connectivity that a person such as myself relies on. It can't do everything, of course. There were things that I had to borrow Nick's computer for, such as doing the show report, blogging, and other things like paying my credit card bill, that I just felt better about doing on a full computer. But for email, calendar, Facebook, keeping my Flickr photos updated with my traveling adventures, reading emails and documents, podcasts, my phone was sometimes a little more cumbersome, but it allowed me to continue doing most of the things I needed to do. The quality of Safari on the iPhone is also pretty amazing. Although it doesn't support all the more advanced functions of certain web pages, and can be unwieldy to use with pages of unconventional layouts, I was surprised at how many pages I was able to use that I figured would just not work. It wasn't always pretty, but when I had no other option, I was glad just to be able to keep running my life at all.

The Ongoing Adventures of a Geek Without a Computer

Day 5 without computer. The 4" iPhone screen is feeling extremely claustrophobic. I don't mind it so much for reading web pages, but for any page that requires input and typing (blogs, forums, etc.) it can be really frustrating to use, and usually doesn't render properly.

I'm currently using Nick's Macbook. It's load-in day, and we're basically done after an hour, as usual. So I'm grabbing this opportunity to bogart his computer once again. It's kind of comical how many copies I have of my "TAC" folder with all the show stuff in it. It's still on my computer somewhere out there in the bowels of Apple repair world, it's on my backup drive, on Nick's computer, and on two thumb drives. The only thing left for me to do would be to hide the two thumb drives in different places -- like put one of them in my suitcase. Which is probably a good idea since normally all three of my thumb drives live side-by-side in my computer bag (which I suppose should now be referred to as "bag").

We're loading in in Tucson, where the Arizona Theatre Company has another venue. A lot of the department heads are the same folks we worked with in Phoenix, so it's been very easy. The theatre is not quite as fancy, but it seems very nice so far. I took some video of our truck driver, Scotty D., backing the trailer at a crazy angle to their loading dock.

Well I must move on and do all the other things that one does while one has a computer.

My Inner Monologue in Weather Widgets

Our wardrobe supervisor has nicknamed this tour "The Big Thaw" as we are (theoretically) moving from one of the coldest places national tours go, in the middle of winter, to the warmer climates of the US as we get towards summer.  After two months in Minneapolis, we are all a little bit obsessed with the weather.  It's a constant topic of discussion among both cast and crew.  What is the weather like tomorrow?  Will it rain on load-out day?  What's the forecast in our next city for the day we arrive?  What did your mom/brother/spouse/roommate tell you on the phone this morning about the weather in New York?

I currently keep four weather widgets running on my dashboard at all times, which usually have to be updated every day or two as we travel.  Below is an example of a current screenshot, and the purpose that each of them serves.  Bear in mind when looking at these that a week ago the crew was in Nashville on our day off, wearing tee shirts and eating outdoors at a restaurant when it was 73 degrees.

A Sonnet

Tonight I write a poem with pen and pad
Upon this two-show day of Henry V.
My iPhone rests behind my chair plugged in,
The cord supplied of insufficient length.
O what can I with simple paper do
Of import that would match my Facebook's state?
An email might for many minutes sit
Unknown, unread, devoid of swift reply.
Tomorrow's weather stays a mystery,
No picture sent to Flickr when it's took.
I fear a post comes from my favorite blog,
And yet I'll know it not upon this hour --
Perhaps to wait until I reach my home.
And oh for shame, however will I know
One of my apps perhaps is obsolete,
An update waiting in the App Store now
That was not there to get an hour past.
The world is changing, yet I can't be told,
But sit and call a show five centuries old.

iPhone Wallpaper

I've created a wallpaper for my iPhone that I'm liking so much, I might as well share it.  Here it is.  I have no idea what it is.  I guess it's some kind of rainbow laser beam, which as far as I know is a physical impossibility.  But it looks kind of cool as a lock screen wallpaper (especially when an alert pops up in front of it).  If you have a jailbroken iPhone and use Winterboard to customize your home screen, it also looks pretty cool as a background behind your icons.  It's a good fit for me because I like the default look of the home screen, so I don't want to customize it with something too crazy.  This keeps the basic appearance the same, but just adds a nice extra touch (see below).

If you like it you can click on the thumbnail above and get it in full size. If you want to post it somewhere feel free, but please link to this site, and don't sell it or do anything stupid like that, and that's fine with me.

Cycorder Tutorial For Mac Users Who Hate Terminal

I mentioned in my roundup of useful iPhone apps, the video recording app Cycorder.  It requires your iPhone to be jailbroken (which I'm not going to get into, but this is the blog of the team of hackers who develop the jailbreaking software, which will have the latest software and info).  

I'm going to assume that your iPhone is jailbroken and you're on a Mac (there are ways to do this on the PC, I just don't have the experience or interest to do it just for the hell of it).  I am also doing this in Leopard, so the part about the Finder would look a little different in other versions of OS X.  

Cydia is the primary app for downloading unauthorized software onto your jailbroken iPhone.  It will appear in your list of apps once you have jailbroken.  The apps you will need to download in Cydia are:

OpenSSH (so you can access your iPhone through Terminal on your Mac)

Cycorder (the app we're talking about here)

Netatalk (so we don't have to use terminal anymore)

You can go ahead and install them all at once.  Only Cycorder will show up as an icon with your apps.  The other two are background apps.

Cycorder will function as an app on its own, happily shooting videos and playing them back for you on the phone.   If you want to move the videos off the phone, this is where the other stuff comes in.  Netatalk gives your phone support for standard Apple file sharing.  Once it's installed, if your iPhone is on the same wireless network as your Mac, it will show up in your Finder under "shared."  (If you don't have access to a wireless router, just create a network with your Mac using the "Create network" option in the airport menu, and call it whatever you want.  Then have the iPhone join the network.)  

So now you see your phone in the Shared section of your Finder, and when you click on it it will probably say "Connection failed." Click the button "Connect As" in the upper-right and it will bring up a username/password window.  Make the name "mobile" and the password "alpine" (the default iPhone password) and it will give you access to your files.   The folder you're looking for is Mobile/Media/Videos, in there you will find the videos you took with Cycorder, in handy .mov Quicktime format.

Now you have what you want.  You would be done, provided you never find yourself on the same network as someone who knows something about iPhone hacking and wants to take a look at your files.  So it's a good idea to change the password for the iPhone's "Mobile" user from "alpine" to, well, anything else.   Now we have to use the Terminal, just for a second.

1. Make sure your phone is on the same network as your Mac.

2. On the phone, go to settings, wifi, and then click the little ">" arrow for the network you are on to bring up details.

3. Look at the IP Address.

4. On your Mac, open Terminal

5. Type ssh mobile@[the IP address from the phone] and hit enter.

6. Terminal will probably think for a minute, then ask if you're sure you want to connect.  Say yes.

7. It will then ask for the password.  Type alpine and hit enter.

8. You will now be at the command prompt.  Time to change the password.

Type passwd mobile and hit enter.

9. It will ask for the original password (alpine), and then for the new password, and then for the new password again to confirm.  Make the password whatever you want.

10. We also need to change the password for the phone's "root" user, which is also "alpine," because the same random hacker on your network could also get in there and cause lots of trouble.  The process is the same.  Follow the steps again, except type "root" instead of "mobile" and change the password to whatever you want.

11. When you're done, type exit and hit enter, and close Terminal forever.

From now on when you connect to the iPhone through the Finder you will enter the name "mobile" and the password will be the new one you chose.  You can check "remember this password" and never have to enter it again if you like.  The important thing is that some random person who connects to your network won't know what the password is.  

Enjoy!

The iPhone App Store and Stage Management (and Fun)

Well I'm in music rehearsals for a NYMF show (Twilight in Manchego), so this means you get some blog posts while I sit doing mostly nothing to the soothing sounds of Chuck Cooper learning his music.

Today my topic is a roundup of what I'm using on my iPhone to make my job, and life, easier.  My initial reactions can be found in this post.

Time:Calc $1.99

Some people reviewing on the app store don't seem to get this.  "Why would you need a calculator to work with time?  Just do it in your head." These people obviously don't understand that there are people who suck at math, or the enormous amount of time calculations a stage manager does all day long, and moreover, that there are stage managers who suck at math.  This app is so amazing, I use it all the time.  I've gotten pretty good in my career at calculating in 1hr 20 min blocks (the standard Equity break schedule), but for more difficult calculations, like running time down to the second (i.e. 8:05:30 - 9:21:35), there is much more room for error.  Some conductors will drive themselves crazy over a few seconds variation in the running time, no need to freak everybody out with bad math when it can be done with instant accuracy on the calculator.  This is of course for situations where you don't enter the run times in a report that calculates it for you.  But whatevs, I don't spend my whole life on Broadway, you know, and I don't need to create a database for a show that runs 10 performances or less.  This app is attractive, cheap, and works exactly how you think it should.

OmniFocus $19.99

This app is pretty expensive at $20, but I find it worth the cost.  I can't afford the desktop companion, but I like keeping everything on my phone in one place anyway.  It also backs up to my iDisk, which is great, since I'm often updating my firmware and reinstalling my apps because the App Store/iTunes is busted.  I was looking for a simple Todo app, and found all the ones I tried suck.  So I decided to go for a very not-simple app instead.  I won't go into all the details, but it's location-aware (so you can see a list of tasks based on which are closest to your current location), very powerful with multiple ways to organize projects and contexts in multiple sublevels, and it's a neat and clean interface that's very finger-friendly while containing tons of information.   Considering I stopped using Todos altogether with Windows Mobile because the app was such a pain, I feel my life getting a bit more organized already.

iTransNYC $4.99

Much better than the cheaper alternative, it contains a very clean subway map, on which you can tap on a station to see a list of the trains that stop there and their schedules (which are never right, but I blame that on the MTA, not on the app).  It can put your current location on the map.  It gives you service changes as well as current alerts, like trains skipping a station because of police activity.  It can also do directions from one station to another (not from addresses, but I don't find this to be a big problem in my life), and it will tell you where you need to transfer if necessary and give you a time estimate.  I have no idea if the time estimate is accurate, probably not, but again that's the MTA's problem.   It's got my daily commute at 23 minutes, which is pretty damn close to my estimate of 25 mins, on a good day.  But if all estimates are assumed to be on a good day, at least that gives you an idea.   The best part of the app is that most of the features (including the route calculation, impressively) can be used offline, which is essential for anyone living in New York, where the majority of the time I'm looking something up on my phone I'm underground.   The service advisories are cached, although you have to remember to open the app above ground and download new ones if you want them to be up to date.  That other app, CitytransitNYC, looks up service advisories, but does it live, it can't show them to you once you're underground, which is close to useless if you're debating whether or not to change your travel plans en route.

Weatherbug Free

I don't trust the built-in weather app for a second -- literally I don't trust it to tell me what's going on right now, much less in an hour or tomorrow.  Weatherbug is more detailed and also gives advisories on serious weather conditions.  At Reagle I used it to warn me when I was about to get struck by lighting in the parking lot.  This isn't exactly job related (unless you're doing outdoor theatre, in which case it might be the most important app you have), but I feel it's one of those secondary jobs of the stage manager to have an answer for everything, including whether it's going to rain on our day off.

Flashlight Free, requires jailbreak

There are a number of flashlight apps.  The one I use requires the phone to be jailbroken, because it makes the screen brighter than Apple will allow the official apps to be.  But if you don't want to go that route, there are some on the App Store, many free.  Personally I think if you have to resort to this you have failed as a stage manager, but not as epic of a failure as if you don't have a flashlight and don't have this app.

Files $6.99

When I was looking for an app to put documents on my phone, I had three requirements: doesn't require a proprietary desktop app, displays the documents well, and has a pretty interface.  This app has all three, so I'm happy.  If you've got your phone on the same network as your computer, it tells you what address to put in to mount your iPhone in the Finder (I assume it works on a PC, probably not as simply).  I keep a PDF of the Equity rulebook for whatever contract I'm working on, the script, calendar, schedule and contact sheet for my current show, and whatever else I need.

Wikipanion Free

An app to easily search Wikipedia without having to load the rather phone-unfriendly web page. I suppose this could be used for legitimate rehearsal research, but what I find myself using Wikipedia most for while working is looking up trivia that comes up while running a show.  It can be hard to do while calling some shows, but generally you can find someone on the crew who plays on their laptop while doing their not-so-demanding job. For example when I was doing Annie this summer, during the cabinet scene Morganthau is introduced as "Acting Secretary of the Treasury." Why was he acting secretary, and what happened to the real secretary of the treasury?  Wikipedia can tell you.  I expect this app to make it much easier to answer these kind of burning questions when it's not practical to have a laptop backstage.

UPDATE: 1 More!
Cycorder Free, requires jailbreak
This is a video-recording app which takes very good quality video for a phone camera.  It did not originally support audio in its first release, but it does now.  It's free, and supported by advertising which is very subtle and non-intrusive, and very much appreciated as an alternative to the other video app which costs money (which I think is rather silly for an app that is technically not supported on the phone and could be disabled by Apple at any point in the future). The app doesn't have a built-in way to get videos off the iPhone, so it requires a little more computer knowledge to do that.  I don't know much about UNIX and I'm not a fan of using the terminal to work with files, so the method I prefer is to install an app through Cydia called Netatalk, which makes your iPhone able to communicate with a Mac through standard Apple filesharing, so if the phone and Mac are on the same network, you will automatically see the phone in your Finder under "shared."  From there you can log into the phone and browse to the folder where the videos are stored.  Check out this post for a tutorial on how to do this.

The Penny is Relevant Again!

This may be the only thing giving purpose to coins in the 21st Century.

Coinstar has begun offering gift certificates in place of cash receipts for coins. Doesn't sound that interesting yet, right? OK, Coinstar is now offering iTunes gift certificates for coins, AND, you don't pay any kind of fee on the amount you deposit. If you have $4.28 in coins sitting in a drawer or bowl somewhere, you get $4.28 to spend on the music or iPhone/iPod apps of your choice. This, combined with the fact that Duane Reade is now installing Coinstar machines in many of their stores, has made my app purchases for my iPhone essentially free.  I even bought the one that looks like a lighter, just because I can (iLightr, it's much more realistic and interactive than the others, though I don't recommend buying it with money that didn't come from your metaphorical couch cushions).

Anyway, this development has brought me great happiness, and turned change from a nuisance into an easy way to pay for apps and music.

3G iPhone!!!!!!

So I got a 3G iPhone this weekend. In brief, it's everything I thought it would be: incredibly cool, and lacking a number of obvious features that I hope I can live without.

Things I LOOOVE:
MobileMe (when it works). Push seems to work sometimes and not others. Sometimes my phone receives mail before the desktop, and sometimes it seems to forget to check. The other thing to know (which Apple never really made clear) is that push only works on the iPhone and the MobileMe servers, your desktop will not push out to the "cloud," only at 15 minute intervals. I can see how this will result in things getting completely out of sync.

I woke up this morning to see that about 700 of my contacts were gone. They still existed on my Mac and on MobileMe, so everything was fine, but somehow the phone lost them. Not sure what's going on with that. I love the idea of what MobileMe is, and I can't believe it's taken Apple so long to get something going on the concept of "Exchange for the rest of us." I don't work in a corporate environment, but my job could sure benefit from Exchange-type features, and Apple was just the company to do it. I'm glad to see that's finally taking shape. I just hope it's more reliable than .Mac was. So far it would seem... no. But it's only been like 4 days.

Coming from AT&T's Tilt (aka HTC's Kaiser), which has horrible video performance, the UI is just gorgeous. This is not something really particular to the new iPhone, but it's nice to finally get to experience a responsive UI. There are a lot of things that are just iPhone-specific that I'm now getting to enjoy for the first time. Like a wifi setup that's easy enough to do that I actually bother to activate it to take advantage of the higher speeds. On the Tilt it was such a pain that using AT&T's network everywhere was faster and more reliable in the long run.

The camera is actually really good so far. It is what it is, and I know other people expected an upgrade, but this 2MP camera takes much better photos than the 3MP one on the Tilt. It seems to do pretty well in low light conditions as well.

Google Maps -- so much better than the versions available for other phones. Most of all, the bookmarks. I don't understand why all the other versions don't have an easy way of saving locations you use all the time. It works basically like other versions, I haven't tried the turn-by-turn directions on the road yet. I did get completely lost driving in Boston last night and the GPS helped me escape back to the safety of the Mass Pike in just a few minutes, using just the time I had while stopped at red lights. I didn't actually do a search for directions, just pressed the button to find my location and looked at the map to figure out which street I had to get on. The GPS link is very fast (probably using a combination of cell location, that wifi-search-thing they're using, and actual GPS -- but I think the real GPS must work quickly because the location is too accurate to be anything else). My Tilt could take minutes to get a GPS lock, if ever.

The App Store I'm a bit addicted to the App Store at the moment, seeing all there is to see. I have always bought tons of software for my phones, but this is the first platform I've used where free trials aren't the norm. I haven't made any purchases that I really regret, but I know they're coming.
So far I have: Super Monkey Ball (just because it's the "in" thing to buy -- it's cool)
MotoRacer (just to play with the accelerometer in a racing game)
Enigmo (a puzzle game which got great reviews -- I like it)
SplashID (a secure password and personal info app which I've used for probably 7 years now on Palm)
Citytransit New York (I'm away from home right now, but this is a really cool subway / train map and service advisory program which I can't wait to put to use)

I haven't gone crazy with the free apps, but these are the ones I have:
Remote (Apple's own app to control iTunes on your Mac or AppleTV via wifi)
NY Times (nice format for checking out what's going on in the world while bored)
IGN Reviews (for those times when I'm in a game store and need to read a review fast)
Shazam (listens to a song and tells you the name and artist -- seems to work well, even on showtunes)
Facebook (quite limited, but good for quick status updates and stuff)

BAD THINGS:
No ability to send mail from an alias. I have 3 aliases in addition to my main account on MobileMe. Unlike on the desktop Mail app (or any other phone app I've ever used) there's no way to send an outgoing message from one of the other aliases. It's not something I need too often, but it's making me consider switching away from my MobileMe account and getting a bunch of gmail accounts for my secondary emails instead.

Copy and paste (of course). Have only needed it once so far in the last 3 days, when someone texted me and asked for someone else's phone number.

Tethering: I would gladly pay AT&T more if I had to in order to get Bluetooth tethering support. I use it CONSTANTLY at work, and kind of can't live without it. I often work in places without internet access, so I need to bring my own, and doing everything on the phone is not enough -- I need my laptop to be able to get online. The only way I managed to buy the iPhone at all is with the hope that if I had to I could stick the SIM card in my Tilt and tether that way (I hope). But that involves carrying the Tilt around and keeping it charged. Once the new software is jailbroken there should be a way to do it. I just hope that happens soon. I really wouldn't mind doing it legally, if AT&T were willing to take my money, but I guess they're not.

I read on a theatrically-minded review that you can't turn off the cell radio without going into airplane mode, meaning you can't use wifi with the cell radio off. I have happily found that this is not true! You go into airplane mode and it will shut off all radios, but you can then turn the wifi radio back on. This is very helpful for theatrical types because phone radios (particularly GSM) cause interference with speakers and wireless headsets, and the sound people and anyone on headset with you will hate you if you leave your phone on during a show. But wifi frequencies do not cause this problem, so I'm used to using wifi to continue to have data access when I need to turn my phone off, and I'm glad to see the lack of this was just a false alarm.

Anyway, so far I'm very happy, and I know this is just the beginning for MobileMe and the App Store, and there should be some new stuff coming soon.

A Quick Observation on Technology

As I pack my bag for a day trip to Maine, I thought of something. My car. Here is my car of the moment, a '08 Chevy Aveo, which I love despite the fact that it's got absolutely manual everything. In past years my cars have had CD players, sunroofs, power locks and windows, and that little remote to lock and unlock the car. But none of them made me as happy as the little baby blue '05 Aveo I had my first year at Reagle.

The Aveo comes with a key. That's it. You get a key. You want in, use a key. You want to lock it, close the door and use the key, because obviously Enterprise doesn't want to come picking you up when you lock your keys inside, so it's very difficult to do that.

So to cut to the chase, I'm packing for the day. I've been driven to Ogunquit before, but never done the drive myself, so I was going to use the GPS on my phone (AT&T Tilt, for the next however-many-days until the 3G iPhone comes out). But I thought of how long I'll be gone and worried that an hour and a half of GPS could kill my battery before the end of the day. If only I had a phone charger in the car. My previous few rental cars, which were of a higher class, had AC outlets in the car, which was awesome. The Aveo has a cigarette lighter. No way I'm buying a car charger for a phone I intend to use for less than a month, when I don't even own a car to begin with. I really don't understand why any car would still feature a cigarette lighter and not an AC outlet these days. Less people smoke, more people need gadgets in their cars. Why, Chevy, why?

I said to myself, "It's 2008, why do I need to power my phone off the cigarette lighter?" Then I realized it's 2008 and to get the window open I need to contort my arm and roll a little crank down. To open the door for a passenger I need to unbuckle myself and launch myself across the car to pull up the lock. Why should I be upset that I can't plug in my phone? But then I packed the other gadget I was bringing -- my iPod. For whatever reason, this car has a crank to roll down the window, no CD player, no tape deck or anything that could be considered a "feature" other than four wheels and an engine, but has a jack in its bare-bones radio for an iPod. Sure it's for whatever audio device you choose to plug in, but let's be honest, it wasn't added to the design specs for an iRiver whatever, it's for an iPod. Thus proving that the iPod is a more culturally important invention than apparently power windows, doors, alternating current and the compact disc.

Sometimes Apple Scares Me

But in that way that you can't even worry about your privacy because it's just so damn cool.

Hey, two posts in one day! I have to tell you what just happened to me.

I'm doing this reading next week, so I'm in preproduction. I have some contact info for the cast and creative team, so I'm starting to enter it into Apple's Address Book app. I'm using the cool new feature that Mail has in Leopard where it detects phone numbers and e-mail addresses in your mail and offers to add them to your address book. Since the only contact info I have is in plain text in an e-mail from the director, this saves me a lot of retyping or cutting and pasting. The system is not perfect by any means, but it's still a time saver.

So I get to this one actor, who is a Broadway actor that I've vaguely heard of, but one I'm sure I've never met. I create a contact in my address book based on his e-mail address, and when I later go back to sort my contacts, I find that the guy's headshot has been added in the photo slot of his contact file! I then see that his e-mail is from a dot Mac account, which no doubt somehow explains this. I'm not sure if this is a feature you have to opt in for, but what I'm guessing is happening is that Address Book automatically matches @mac.com e-mail addresses to the person's account and their own address card. It hasn't filled in any other personal information though, as I'm still lacking his phone number (this is definitely a good thing, for privacy reasons). Maybe it just does the picture. I will post an update if I find out more about how this is done.

UPDATE: Found out how it's done. A quick search on MacNN solves all.
If you have a .Mac account you can go to the webmail page (webmail.mac.com) and click on preferences (upper right of your mailbox area). In the "Composing" tab, there is a place where you can add your photo. Presumably from there all Mac users will see this photo when they read your e-mails in Mail or they enter your e-mail address in their Address Book. I didn't have a photo set, but obviously I need to add one now. Will it look unprofessional if I use my default iChat icon?

Preproduction and Software

Ooh, great, another one of those posts where I actually cover the full span of what this blog is about -- theatre and technology, and how I use them together. We've been in meetings all week for Frankenstein, and I'm having a great time. As the ASM, my contract doesn't start for another day or two, but I've been happily attending all the meetings with the PSM, as being in the loop is much more important to me than being paid, and quite frankly I didn't have a lick of work last week and was bored out of my mind. So sitting in formatting meetings every day has been great fun, as we work through the show with the various design elements.

Monday and Tuesday were focused mostly on the set, with the director, choreographer and set designer, and us two stage managers. Wednesday was our sound day, with our two sound designers and the musical director. This is definitely a show where the sound design will contribute a lot, and I can't wait to hear more about that. Today and tomorrow are all about projections, which will also be a key part of the show, and then we do lights and everybody together on the weekend.

It's been very helpful for me to see the show take shape as everyone decides together how things will go. I have been taking notes on everything (using Pages), and have been using the very attractive comments feature to mark events that will likely be cues for me on the deck. See the drawing to the right for a sample page. I'm very happy that we haven't even started rehearsal and already I'm thinking about what I need to be doing on the deck at any moment, and can look at the groundplan and plot my backstage traffic and ask the designer questions as they come up.

Some of the more artistic stuff is something I'll probably never need to know as part of my job, but having grown up and gone to college wanting to be a director, I still find it really interesting to be in the room as the basic vision of the show takes shape and is altered through collaboration. The creative team is really great, and the mood in meetings is very positive and fun. It's definitely one of those moments where I have realized how lucky we are that we get to put on shows for a living. Sure it's serious business and all our jobs and rent depend on not screwing this up, but it's got to be more fun than the vast majority of other professions.

A Clean Slate
Since I've been back from Reagle and lacking any kind of seriously demanding employment for the first month, I've taken this time to experiment with some technological toys that I wouldn't risk playing around with if I was in the middle of production. Getting confirmation of the Frankenstein job with a couple weeks notice before beginning rehearsal, I have seen this as something of a clean slate to try a few things I've been wanting to.

Mail
I think I mentioned in my review of Pages that I see this latest edition of iWork as a possible precursor to me effectively removing Microsoft Office from my life. The big thing holding me back was Entourage, which I much preferred over the combination of Mail, Address Book and iCal. I shouldn't say I much preferred, just that I stuck with the power of it, despite the vaguely Windows-esque feel of it.

Another part of this decision, less obvious at first, but lurking in the shadows, is the iPhone. I don't want one now. I want a smartphone, and a phone that can't open and edit a Word document or spreadsheet, or open an image file in its native resolution, or cut and paste, is not very smart. There is a litany of things Palm devices have been doing for five years that the iPhone can't do. Third party hacked software has been helping this, but I'm not yet at a level of comfort where the iPhone is something I want. I'm definitely not jumping on the bandwagon until the second version, and I'm not too thrilled about AT&T on top of that. But I see that especially given how embarrassingly Palm has stagnated in recent years, there will be an iPhone in my future. And when that day comes, I'll want it integrated as nicely as possible into my Mac. And that means using Mail and Address Book and iCal to get the full effect of the Mac experience. So being able to make this transition at a convenient time will save me trouble later, if and when I get an iPhone.

I also have been depending more and more on having access to my e-mail on my Treo. For years I have used SnapperMail, which is a very mature Palm mail client, but the version I own is only for POP mail. I am something of a pack rat, in real life and in my digital life. My goal is to keep every e-mail I ever send and receive in my life (excluding spam and advertisements and the like). Somewhere along the line I lost my earlier mail, but my current archives go back to the end of 2002. For this reason, IMAP mail has always turned me off. The idea of my mail residing on a server and maybe or maybe not being saved to my desktop client scared the hell out of me. But handling POP mail on my Treo while trying to keep complete records on my main computer was somewhat frustrating. I was willing to give IMAP another try, which meant using my .Mac account, which offered a perfect opportunity to give Apple's Mail app another try.

I have been a member of .Mac for a few years now. I think it's a bit overpriced and underdeveloped, and their servers are usually slow, but I use it mostly for iDisk storage and the ease of use and integration into OS X. I'm fully capable of doing things the hard way, but for what amounts to $8 a month, I don't mind having Apple take care of most of it for me. With that of course comes an @mac.com e-mail address, which I have never bothered to use because I was never sure I wanted to keep the service.

E-mail
The next seemingly unrelated event in my life was that my parents moved over the summer, and on the day I returned from Reagle I went to their house and set up their wireless network. In the course of testing it, I noticed they were getting download speeds in the neighborhood of 12mbps. They have Optimum Online, on Long Island. Now I knew I was not getting anything near this from Time Warner/Earthlink. So when I got home I found I was lucky to get about 5mbps. It seems from my research this is the maximum speed of the network that people are reporting in NYC. This did not seem fair to me, and planted the seeds of discontent. However, ditching Earthlink would mean changing my e-mail address. I'm terrified of changing my phone number or e-mail, because I fear that someone I haven't talked to in five or ten years will suddenly need to get in touch with me and will be unable to. Combine this problem with my interest in switching my e-mail to IMAP, and suddenly a plan was formed: if I used my .Mac account as my primary e-mail I could switch ISPs as often as I need to to get the best service, yet not have to worry about changing my e-mail address. Plus I'd get the cool and easy-to-type @mac.com address, which most importantly has much fewer letters than @earthlink.net.

So it all came together at once and I sent out an e-mail blast to all my friends and former coworkers advising them of the change, and created e-mail aliases for my other three addresses and updated the relevant sites and institutions about the change. And I have been using Mail ever since. The rules are definitely less flexible than Entourage's, but overall I'm happy with it. Plus, Leopard is coming out in a month or so, and with that an update to Mail which might have some improvements.

On the Palm side, I have switched to Chatter, which is widely regarded as the best IMAP client for Palm OS. The developer has since been hired by Palm, hopefully to design something cool for their next mail client, so development on the current version has pretty much ceased. I'm not thrilled about paying for an app I know is no longer in development, but given the circumstances, I think it's something I have to do to take advantage of IMAP. I find I'm using my Treo more for responding to e-mail because I'm not worried about it being in sync with my desktop. Just tonight on the train I wrote two e-mails that I normally would have waited until I got home to respond to.

Pages
I'm really getting to like Pages, the only dilemma I have is whether it's appropriate in situations where I may need to share my work with others using Word. I think I've been pretty bold about using it for almost all my Frankenstein documents. I have been placed in charge of creating and maintaining the contact sheet, and today decided to go ahead and do it in Pages. I think first of all it will be much better for my sanity as I work with it, and I think the formatting will come out much cleaner and more legible. We have also decided to distribute it in PDF, which means I don't have to worry about what Word decides to do with it. I will have a Word version, as some people will need to work on it occasionally, and I will keep an eye on the compatibility to make sure it's not a disaster, but I hope that I will be able to do it in Pages without embarrassing myself. Anyway, so far Macs outnumber PCs in our production team 6-to-1 by my last count, so I doubt I'll hear too much bashing.

Numbers
I like the feel of Numbers, but so far in my experience, and from what I've been reading, it's not as sufficient a replacement for Excel as Pages is to Word. I guess this is to be expected, as this is the third version of Pages and only the first for Numbers. There are some things with formulas it can't do, but for the most part working in show business, and being largely more concerned with the "show" than the "business," I hardly ever use spreadsheets to crunch numbers. I received Frankenstein's prop list in Excel, and have since been editing it in Numbers, as it's just a list and should export back into Excel easily enough if necessary.

iCal
I'm just going to come out and say I love iCal. I always have. I have always preferred iCal to Entourage's calendar, it was just all the other baggage involved in switching away from Entourage that kept me from it. But now I get to use it every day.

My real work on Frankenstein began last Sunday when I got together with my PSM, Joshua, for a working lunch. One of the biggest things we had to tackle was to make some sense of the very short period of time we have for production and to propose a schedule, taking into account the needs of the production team and all the various Equity rules. I had been putting a rough sketch of the show schedule into iCal for my personal use, in a separate Frankenstein calendar.

Using the very clear and intuitive week view in iCal, we started dragging around rehearsals, dragging them between days, dragging them earlier or later in the day, of longer and shorter duration. It was very easy to see what we were working with and play around with it. While my version is not the official production calendar, it's what we've been using whenever we're brainstorming schedule changes. I couldn't be happier with the way it's working.

Address Book
The final piece of this puzzle is Address Book, and it's probably my least favorite part. While the layout is very simple and easy to navigate and generally Mac-like, I've always found it a little too simple at first glance. Syncing contacts from any platform to Palm is always scary. If they don't quite play nice together all of a sudden you'll find people missing, duplicated, or all their e-mail addresses listed as phone numbers and all their phone numbers listed as e-mails. I've been backing up both ends a lot, just in case something bad happens. One basic thing I don't like is that the Apple apps don't deal with "categories" per se, in the way that Palm and the Microsoft apps do. iCal has calendars, and Address Book has groups, but they're not exactly the same, especially in Address Book. See the problem is that on the Palm side, an item can only be in one category at a time. This is kind of Palm's fault, since they haven't innovated anything since about 2002, but in Address Book you can put a contact into multiple groups, and it's quite difficult to tell you've done so, until you notice that on the Palm it's not where you expected to see it. This is sort of a problem in Entourage as well, where you can assign something to multiple categories, but it's harder to do accidentally.

Also, Entourage makes a distinction between categories, which are used to organize contacts, and groups, which are lists for e-mail distribution. I can have a Frankenstein category that contains everyone involved in any way in the production, and then separate groups for cast, production team, rehearsal report list, etc. so that when I send e-mails I have various pre-made lists to choose from based on who I want to contact. In Address Book the only form of organization is groups. If I want to send a mass e-mail to a bunch of people, I need to create a separate group with that bunch of people, which is a little confusing and clutters up my categories on the Palm end. I think having an iPhone or any device that behaves more similarly to Address Book would ease my concerns with this.


Overall I'm enjoying the new toys I've been playing with, and I have a few more to try out soon.

BBP Hamptons Bag Review

While browsing the online Apple Store for something new, I came across a new bag. It needs to be said that I am a major bag whore. I own lots of bags, each one appropriate for a slightly different situation, most of them with lots of fun pockets and compartments. Since the last year and a half has been devoted to the purchase of a Macbook Pro, which I finally now have, I haven't been buying new bags because I was saving every penny for the new computer. I also hadn't seen anything to catch my eye lately. Until I stumbled across this bag.


The company's website is here. I ended up not purchasing it from the Apple Store. If I had been able to find one in an Apple Store, I would have, but online I found it much cheaper on Amazon (retail price is $95, but I got it for $50), and I have been putting ridiculous amounts on my Amazon credit card, so my gift certificates covered it. It comes in other colors, but I liked this titanium and orange one best. They come in three sizes: small, medium and large, which hold different sized laptops. I got the medium as they claim it perfectly fits the 15" Macbook Pro, which it does. It also comes with some velcro-in padded inserts that you can use to customize the shape for your particular laptop. I actually used all of them in the bottom of the laptop compartment to provide a little extra cushioning.

The straps
The thing that makes this bag unique (and maybe a little frightening) is that you can wear it like a messenger bag over one shoulder, or like a backpack by converting the strap so that it attaches to the middle of the bag and over both shoulders. You may ask yourself, "Won't I look like an idiot with a messenger back dangling down on my lower back?" I asked myself the same thing. Maybe? Probably? But I decided it might be worth a try, and if it was really humiliating, at least I would still have a new messenger bag to wear in the regular style.

My first reaction to trying the straps is that it is indeed quite comfortable to wear the bag backpack-style. It also works well over one shoulder with the strap in backpack configuration, so it's sort of a cross between backpack and messenger. It takes a little re-rigging to really switch modes, so I have been finding this the best way to be able to swap back and forth quickly.

Once I started using it on a day-to-day basis, I discovered a system that seemed to work well. I wear it backpack style as I walk to and from the train and my apartment, where it's not crowded. While on the train, I switch it to messenger style, which works better in the tight confines of midtown streets where I can put it in front of me, to the side, or slung around to the back depending on the size of space I need to squeeze through. The bag definitely feels much heavier in messenger style, but it's rather wide when worn on the back, and has been getting caught on things.

The other annoyance I have about wearing it backpack style begins with something BBP has on their site:I was very comforted to hear this before purchasing, as I'm 5'0" and often find that no matter how high on your back a bag is supposed to ride, it always winds up hanging down on my butt and distorting all the intended weight-distributing design. I thought maybe I was in the clear with this one. No such luck. I have read a review claiming that despite the low-hanging design, the bag does not bounce on your butt. Let me tell you, if you're 5'0" you can hike up all the straps to their shortest length, and the bag will still bounce on your butt. Hard. With every step. That's thousands of bounces every time you go somewhere, and I don't appreciate my laptop being bounced on anything thousands of times a day, even though the padding on the back of the bag is quite thick.


Brightly lined interior... or not
One of the things I found appealing about this bag that I now look for in all my bags is that the interior should be a bright color so you can find stuff in it. My bags, especially my computer bags, hold lots of tiny little cables and adapters, and generally I find them by sticking my hand way down into the pockets and finding stuff by touch. This is not really ideal. I was a bit disappointed when the bag arrived to discover that only two of the compartments have the fun yellow interior, and even that is a stretch. The big giant compartment is yellow, which is less helpful to me because I tend to put big giant things in the big giant compartment, and big giant things are usually easier to find anyway. The wide compartment in the front has yellow on the back side, adjoining the big giant compartment, but the pockets and the outer side are black. So you can sort of see things in the pockets, but anything sitting in the space in front of the pockets (which happens to be the natural place for all my cables and adapters) is lost in the blackness. Every other compartment in the bag is all black. Considering they tout this as one of the features of the bag, it feels a little half-assed when only one of the bag's eight compartments is fully lined in a bright color.

The shower test
About once a year it seems I find myself walking 20 blocks or more in a torrential downpour. The kind of downpour where it feels like there's more water than air in the air. For this reason when I buy a bag capable of holding my computer the first thing I do before ever letting it carry my computer is put it in the shower. I stick pieces of paper in the various pockets where sensitive items might be, and after letting my shower rain down on it for a while, I check to see if the papers got wet.

I'm sorry to say this bag did not entirely pass. The manufacturer clearly states on the website that it's water resistant, not waterproof, but I was especially worried by the fact that the laptop compartment is conveniently located behind the main flap so that you can take your computer out without opening the flap. It has a water-resistant zipper, but it's not protected from water like it would be if the flap covered it.



After ten minutes under the shower (suspended, not sitting in the water at the bottom), here are the results:
Outside of bag: soaked





Inside flap: surprisingly dry. You can see that the lighter-colored silver area is where the interior pockets pretty much survived.







Inside the big compartment: wet! As you can see the paper was pretty soaked at the bottom, and there was also a large pool of water in the bottom of the bag. I attribute this to the fact that I sometimes spun the bag under the shower head which probably let a bunch of water in through the sides under the flap. Probably more severe than anything that would happen in an actual rainstorm. The large black seam at the top of the photo also showed a little wetness seeping through.

The wide front compartment which I can best describe as "where I would put my power adapter" came out wetter than I would like at the bottom. I attribute this to the fact that the bottom of this compartment adjoins the bottom of the main compartment, which was filled with water.



The pouch in the front came out almost completely dry.







The cute magnetically-sealed iPod compartment: soaked. I expected this, especially because this is the one pouch that doesn't have a zipper, and it's exposed on the outside of the flap. In the rain I would never have my iPod in the external pouch of any bag, but this illustrates why. I didn't bother putting paper inside any of the other outer pouches.






And finally, how has my laptop been faring during this downpour? A bit wet. There is also a little water pooled at the bottom of the compartment. I'm not sure whether it came in from the adjoining compartment or from the seams at the top.

My overall verdict is that while my test was probably more severe than I would encounter in the real world, if I were ever caught in a real rainstorm with this bag and anything water-sensitive in it, my first priority would be to get the hell out of the rain.

The designers did add something helpful that I've never had in a bag before: an umbrella holder on the inside of the flap. I can't demonstrate it because I kind of hate umbrellas and didn't bring one with me this summer. They also give me this cool thing up here called a "car" which means I never have to walk 20 blocks in the rain. But when I get home this will be a nice incentive to carry an umbrella.

Overall
I think it will almost completely replace my usual messenger bag, the Timbuk2 Commute, which is also a great bag (and waterproof), and it should fix the main complaint I have about the Timbuk2, that it's too small to hold much besides my laptop and script and a few accessories. This bag holds enough stuff to actually be usable for rehearsals when I have to bring everything, and the different carrying options will allow me to distribute the weight better than I would be able to with a normal messenger bag, on those days when it's just too heavy for one shoulder.

Some little details I like:
Extra D-rings on the outside of the flap and on the straps for clipping... whatever onto them. I wasn't sure what I was going to use these for, but figured I would find a use eventually. After the final performance of my summer stock season, I had crammed my belongings from the theatre into every possible pocket (see photo for an idea of how wide the bag gets), but I had nowhere safe to put my headset. So I tied the strings of its drawstring bag around one of the D-rings and let it hang on the outside. I wouldn't call that a "safe" way to carry a headset, but for the trip from the booth to the trunk of my car it worked fine.

The open pocket on the back has a zipper at the bottom which opens it up to be put over the handle on a rolling suitcase. I love those things. Here's a picture of it in action on my trip home from Reagle.

The magnetic clip on what is presumably the iPod pouch is classy. A special softer lining on the inside would have been a great touch, but no luck.

One other oddity is the center mesh pocket on the outside of the flap. I'm not a big fan of mesh in general, as I think it will result in the contents falling out, either accidentally, or because a potential pickpocket can see exactly what's in it, limiting it to holding nothing more expensive than a roll of BreathSavers. This particular mesh pocket doesn't even have a piece of elastic at the top. Now think about this: you put something in this pocket, then later you need to get something out of your bag and lift the flap. The outer pocket is now upside down! Something that is designed to be turned upside down as part of its normal operation should probably be closed at the top. Odd.

All in all, this bag has some really bold and smart design choices, but I don't think it's going to fully replace any of the bags I already own.