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I have always been someone who has had a seemingly insatiable need for buying new technology. More RAM, bigger hard drive, faster, faster.

Whenever a new Apple gadget comes out or is announced, I am often asked if I am going to get it. More and more recently, I have decided against it. Not because I am not intrigued by them, but because I realized everything that I have now does everything that I need. Not only that, but I don’t feel like I need it to be any faster than it is.

Here’s a good example. Elana’s 3G iPhone was having problems and was bogging down because she takes so many photos. She was recently able to get the regular upgrade price on an iPhone 4. My brother-in-law asked me why we were getting one now instead of waiting for the iPhone 5. For her needs, why would she need any feature over and above what is available now? She has a faster phone that takes good pictures and has video. She can now use the Navigon GPS software on her phone. She is perfectly happy with this. Why wait?

When the iPad 2 came out, I didn’t even think twice about not getting it. I am happy with what my iPad can do. Why go through the hassle of selling my iPad then buy the iPad 2? Just so it reacts more quickly to my finger swipes? Your use case may vary, but I am finding less and less reason to buy new tech.

This is not relegated to Apple technology. My 2 year old LCD TV is great and nothing out there now is compelling enough for me to want to replace my TV. I will replace this TV when it breaks. 3D? Not interested. Thinner and brighter? I just don’t notice the difference. Internet connected? Apple TV gets the job done, and I don’t want Twitter or Facebook on my television.

I’ll cut my rambling here, but I think you catch my drift. For me, technology has reached a point that I will by new kit when my old kit breaks.

That is until I can afford a home automation system. Then, I’m done. I swear.

I have decided that with my energies mostly devoted to The Straight Beef, I don’t want to maintain a separate domain for my Top 50 music project. It will remain alive as part of this site. I will add the contributions over time. If you want to submit one, feel free. The instructions are here.

From ESPN.com, “Union would consider expanded playoffs,”

 

?The new head of the players’ union says his members are open to adding more wild-card teams for 2012 and possibly extending the division series to a best-of-seven.

Union head Michael Weiner says it’s also possible players would agree to cutting the regular season from 162 games, but that’s more problematic because it would cost teams revenue.

 

I can’t understand why this would be a good thing for baseball. The following would have to happen for this to work, but even then there are inconsistencies.

• Reduce the regular season back to 154 or even less. I know a lot of people who get real baseball fatigue towards the end of the season. Reducing the number of regular season games would help with this.
• Contract the number of teams in the MLB by 2. This will make all the teams better and more competitive.
• To save pitchers killing their arms, allow each team to add one more pitcher roster spot. I know this is counterintuitive to contracting the teams, The pitchers who have to pitch more in the post-season will be thankful for the day off.

Finally, why bother with any of this. I think a salary cap would do more to invigorate the fan base than expanding the playoffs.

There are rumors about that Apple is going to introduce a smaller version of it’s MacBook Air as part of its media event tomorrow. Here is an interesting summary to an article by Jason Snell at macworld.com:

So, to sum up this exercise in making things up out of whole cloth: 11 inches wide, 8 inches deep, 16:9 display with 1366×768 resolution, 1.86GHz dual-core Intel processor, all for $1,199. But that’s just my wild guess. What’s yours?

Here is the link to the entire article. A new MacBook Air? Playing the guessing game

As I look at what I do on my MacBook 13″ (aluminum unibody late 2008) everyday, and this new smaller MacBook Air might fit the bill with me pretty well. I have an iMac that acts a a repository for family photos and videos as well as my iTunes mega-library. It does all the heavy lifting that I need to play video games on Steam and edit video. Plus, I have been trying to reduce the amount of time I am doing work in front of the TV. I have found that my work takes longer to do, and I am barely paying attention to what is going on on TV anyway.

So, when I need to get real work done, I leave the room with my MacBook, or I go up to my iMac. On top of this, I have an iPad which takes care of the majority of web surfing, Facebook, Twitter, and RSS reading needs.

In the end, what am I using my MacBook for? Doing the accounting needs for my practice, organizing the softball team, updating thestraightbeef.com, and doing mild picture editing using Pixelmator. If the major concern with the phantom new MacBook Air is the 11″ screen, I would use Air Display which converts your iPad into a second display.

Using an 11″ MacBook Air with an iPad when necessary would be a good solution for my needs. We’ll see what Apple has in store tomorrow.

?This was a letter that Elana wrote to US Airways about her experience a few months ago. She never heard a response. Please spread it around so maybe we’ll get an answer from them:

To Whom It May Concern at US Airways:

I am not quite sure where to begin except to state that I intentionally waited 24 hours after arriving home to put myself in a more rational frame of mind before writing you.

My name is Elana Mie Scheiner and I had a flight to leave RDU for Logan Airport early Monday morning August 23, 2010.  It was indirect and the night before at 11:30pm I got the call saying the first leg of the early morning flight had been cancelled.  That was frustrating but I understand things happen and I “rolled with it” and booked a different flight going out around the same time.  Frustrating, but bearable.

I then had a return flight coming home leaving at 8:40pm again indirect with a connecting flight in Philadelphia.  On the way to the airport that afternoon I got yet again another call from US Airways saying that my initial flight out was going to be so delayed that I’d miss my connecting flight in Philadelphia.  I thought, wow what are the odds that that would happen twice?!  But again I `rolled with it’.  I got on an earlier flight that was, although delayed, going to get me in in time for my connecting flight.

Well that flight (#728) that I was to take to Philadelphia was delayed more and more to the point I feared again I’d not make my connecting flight.  I asked the attendant if (1) I’d make my flight in time and (2) if it was going to be close would they call ahead and make sure that last flight of the night out of Philadelphia to RDU knew that there were a few of us that would be racing to get to the gate.  He, the US Airways representative agent, ASSURED me I’d have no problem in getting there in time but that IF it was close of course he said they’d wait for those of us racing to make the connection.  He was wrong on both counts.  The handful of other passengers and I raced to make the connecting flight and the plane left without us stranding us there for the night.

It cost my business an insurmountable amount (I am an optometrist and had to cancel patients for 3/4 of Tuesday all thanks to US Airways).

I was appalled that I had to spend my OWN money to pay for a hotel room that was needed due to US Airway’s inefficiency.  I would have gladly stayed in Logan where I had family as I explained to the agent there but he assured me I’d not get stuck in Philadelphia for the night and yet that is exactly what happened.

The flight assigned to me did not leave until 9am and yet my husband was able to look on-line and find me a flight that left earlier through Charlotte (#1420) that connected me to RDU (#2259) landing at 8:30am 30 minutes before the US Airways were offering to get me started on my journey home from Philadelphia.

Racing to the plane in Philadelphia, the one that didn’t wait for me and the others, started an asthma attack and as it was a one day trip (for a funeral) I had no sprint plans on my agenda so did not have my asthma meds.  In addition given the new flight I was to board at 5:15am on Tuesday it made no sense to leave the airport for those 4.5 hours and I again was confounded that I’d be the one paying for a hotel room.  So I spent the night on the cold floor of the Philadelphia airport and it was honestly one of the worst experiences in quite a few years and again all thanks to US Airways.

I am beyond frustrated with my entire US Airways experience and would request a reply to help me possibly understand how I was treated.

Sincerely,

Elana Scheiner

This is not a review of the Apple TV as I have not purchased one yet. The key term here is yet. I was not a big fan of what the original Apple TV offered because I did not want to have to worry about transferring purchases back and forth. It could stream content from iTunes, but I didn’t feel it was worth it given how much it originally cost.

I keep all of my media such as music and movies in iTunes on my iMac. We have about 29,000+ songs in our library. I also have purchased some movies on iTunes, have burned in DVDs, and have cataloged a lot of old SNL skits — about 170 videos all told. I was waiting for a relatively cheap device that I would be able to plug into the TV and have it seamlessly connect with my iTunes library. The new Apple TV seems to fit the bill.

It looks simple enough to use so that my 5-year old daughter should be able to use it without too much fuss. We have a TiVo that allows us to do Amazon Unbox rentals and Netflix if we wanted to. We also get HBO and Showtime because Elana likes to watch all of their original programming without having to wait.

The Apple TV fits a perfect niche for me. I’ll post a review after I get one.

A very cool study on how a lot of pop culture is either based on or blatantly stolen from what came before. I remember my mother-in-law telling me about a conversation she had with someone about how people would be able to create music in the future by accessing a massive database of riffs, bass lines, and melodies. From this anyone could create something “new”.

This is definitely worth your time to watch. Very informative and very well done.

Everything is a Remix from Kirby Ferguson on Vimeo.

I am quoting this section of Gregg Easterbrook’s weekly ESPN.com column Tuesday Morning Quarterback.

Why Isn’t the Pentagon Mosque on the Front Page? There’s a small chance you have heard about a plan to build a mosque near (not “at”) Ground Zero in New York. The controversy is puzzling on many levels, most important, that this is America! Freedom must not be an empty concept. Freedom of religion means freedom of religion. The basic bargain of the First Amendment, as regards speech as well as faith, is that the sole way to protect the right to opinions and beliefs is to protect all opinions and all beliefs, keeping government out of the business of deciding which ones we like or don’t like.

The people who attacked the United States on 9/11 might have called themselves Muslims, though clearly were breaking the tenets of their faith. All religions have produced a few murderous fanatics — we don’t hold this against the faith when Christianity or Judaism is involved. Baruch Goldstein, raised as a Jew, used a machine gun to murder 29 Muslims in 1994 in Hebron. Goldstein was a monster, not a religious believer, and was breaking the tenets of the faith he claimed. No sensible person would say that because of Baruch Goldstein, synagogues should not be built on the West Bank. Timothy McVeigh, who called himself a Christian, murdered 168 people with a terrorist bomb in Oklahoma City, and it’s clear to everyone he was breaking the tenets of his faith. Why can’t we understand the same thing about the 9/11 killers? No one would object to a Christian church being built near the Oklahoma City terror bomb site.

Here’s what really puzzles me — with all the snarling hatred on display regarding the proposed downtown New York mosque, there’s been no discussion of the mosque that already exists inside the Pentagon. Islamic services are held in an interfaith chapel quite close to where a plane flown by murderers struck on 9/11, and that has caused no problems. The Washington Post buried the story on Page A-11, and most newspapers and newscasts haven’t mentioned the Pentagon mosque at all. If the people who work inside the Pentagon can see past their differences and embrace religious tolerance, how come this is impossible for people such as Newt Gingrich?

The link to the entire post which contains a lot of football analysis is here.  I wish more people would look at the big picture because some people that I know on Twitter and Facebook are writing overtly hateful, borderline racist, and completely irrational things.

I fear the road that this would lead down if the majority of people in our country feel this way.  In my opinion it is a slippery slope to ultimately telling people that they are not wanted in this country because of the religion that they practice.

Isn’t that one of the reasons why the founders of our nation fled England?  To escape religious and political persecution?

If anything, we are giving countries and cultures that already hate us more reasons to do so.

I was very excited to see FilemakerGo show up for the iPad. At our office, we use Filemaker Pro for our exam forms. I created the database myself almost 10 years ago when we started our practice. We also use a proprietary piece of software called Macpractice 20/20 for scheduling, billing, recalls, etc. It works very well, but its EMR is average at best. I really like my good old database, so we decided to keep using it.

Our current set up is a Core 2 Duo iMac as our server at the front desk with a 2 TB drive connected to it. The two other front desk staff members use Mac Minis. We have an additional Mac Mini in each of the two exam rooms. To round things out, we have an iMac DV connected to our retinal camera. It is the only computer that is still around from when we opened. It is solely there so we can tether shoot the camera. We used to store retinal files on it until we transferred the images to the front desk hard drive.

I had always had a goal of using a tablet computer to be able to more naturally face the patient while I am talking to him. Once the iPad came out, I was one step closer. Filemaker Go was seemingly the last piece of the puzzle.

I see 20-25 patients a day, and I am very fast with entering patient information into the database using a keyboard and mouse. I am a fair to good typist and can do some typing without looking at the keys. It was very easy to find and open the database on our network. It looks exactly like it does on the iPad as it does on the Mac. Entering text was easy, but I had to put it down to type quickly which defeats the purpose of being able to better face the patient. I also couldn’t view two exams next to each other on the same screen. I could easily switch back and forth between windows on the iPad, but I like to have the new exam and the most previous exam right next to each other for my reference.

Our forms have a lot of pull down menus with commonly used clinical signs for each part of the eye. This is the main reason I cannot use the software to see patients. When I selected the pulldown menu to make a selection, it was a full beat until it popped up. Then another beat after I made the selection until I was able to move to the next one. On the Mac, I can record the results of a slit lamp exam in about 7 seconds. It took me almost a full minute to do it on the iPad.

Overall, it was too slow for me to use in my exam flow and actually stay on time. I think it does have use in our office, though. Our optician often works in his lab or out in the optical. When he wants to check a patient’s prescription or make a note, he needs to go behind the front desk to access a computer, look it up, write it down, then go back to the patient. If he had an iPad, he could tote it with him. It works great for referencing the data. For our needs, it is not the best for recording it.

I think the implementation is very good overall. It simply doesn’t suit our needs in the exam room. Our optician is looking forward to his when we get one for the office.