Like all Apple fanboys, I eagerly awaited the announcement of the iPad mini, and was pleasantly surprised by the announcement of the 4th Generation iPad with the new Lightning connector along side it. However, the iPad mini stole the show with its smaller, pocketable form factor, aluminum construction, and low(ish) price point. As the announcement neared, and rumors flew, I found myself considering, at last, getting an iPad, and knew the announcement would give me a lot to think about. As I’m teaching myself responsive web design, I knew a tablet would be useful for testing things, and also figured it might come in handy at my day job. I mulled it over for a week or so, and then decided to pull the trigger. This past Thursday, November 8th, 2012, I became the proud owner of a 32 GB, Black, Wi-Fi only, refurbished 3rd Generation iPad.

I made the decision based on two simple factors: cost and features. While the iPad mini’s $329 price wasn’t too steep for me—I am an Apple user, after all—it lacked a key feature of it’s bigger brother: retina. Along side learning how to make websites that scale to different screen sizes, I’m also trying to learn how to do retina image replacement. It’s one thing to write the CSS that says if a screen is retina quality, then use the double-size image and scale it down. Making sure it works is a little trickier, especially on a decidedly non-retina laptop. While I am planning to put my battered old white polycarbonate MacBook nothing out to pasture and replace it with a shiny MacBook Pro, unless the price comes down steeply, I won’t be getting a retina model any time soon. Enter the iPad, er, maxi? [1] Whatever you want to/have to call it, this iPad is my gateway to the retina web. Yes, I have an iPhone 4S, with its own shiny retina display, but non-retina graphics look just fine on it due to the screen size. To have a proper testbed for retina and for responsive, tablet-optimized layouts, an iPad with a retina display is what I needed.

So, why a refurbished, 3rd Generation model? It’s good enough, and it costs less. Plain and simple. A new, 32GB, Wi-Fi only 4th Generation iPad costs $599. It has a new plug, which means I would need to get ahold of at least one other Lightning cable, which costs $29. Add on the Smart Cover, and that’s another $49. We’re talking almost $700 for the full kit. The refurbished iPad and the Smart Cover combined, cost a little over $510, or the price of a base, 16GB, Wi-Fi only 4th Generation iPad, and all I lose is a faster processor and a new connecter. I’d rather have the $190 in my pocket. I can spend it on iPad optimized apps, instead. [2]

If money were no object, not only would I have bought a new new iPad, but also an iPad mini. And a Retina MacBook Pro. And a pony. If money were simply less of an object, I’d just have bought the 4th Generation iPad. Here, it’s simply a question of enough, which I’ve written about before, but not as well as others. Speaking from personal experience, Apple refurbished products are literally as good as new. My second Apple computer was a refurbished iBook G4. Built like a tank, it kept kicking even after the machine’s exhaust fan died. [3] There’s enough jokes and complaints about Apple’s pricing, but refurbished models are a great way to get Apple’s quality and save a few bucks. It’s always good to save up and get the best thing, rather than save a few bucks and get something that isn’t going to be worth it.

Certainly, I didn’t need a tablet—it’s a nice to have item, not an essential tool in my arsenal. I’d often told people that I don’t have an iPad because I don’t have a use case for one, though if I had one I would quickly find a use case for it. It’s too early to tell how useful I’ll find the iPad, but in the first few days, it’s already become my device of choice for reading, and social networking. I also wrote most of the first draft of this post on my iPad, using my old aluminum Apple Bluetooth Keyboard that’s been gathering dust.

I’ll also be honest—I never even considered an Android or Windows tablet, because I already locked myself into the Apple ecosystem as soon as I bought an app for the iPod touch, five years ago. I’m not complaining. I’m happy. (And it’s not Stockholm syndrome, either.) I am an Apple user, because I want tools that work with a minimum of fuss. Coming to Apple from Linux in the days when I would have to edit /etc/fstab if I plugged my MP3 player and thumb drive in the wrong order, Mac OS X was a breath of fresh air, as has almost every experience with new Apple hardware and software.

As pleasurable as they are, these things are still tools. When you buy a tool, any tool, you need to factor the price versus the need, and then buy the one that will do the job the best, and for the longest period of time. A hammer that is a solid piece of metal, with a high quality rubber coating around the handle will last you longer than a hammer that is a stamped metal head on a cheap wood or plastic handle. If you can find a quality hammer that meets those criteria for a lower price, why not go for it? My MacBook, my iPhone, and now my iPad are the best tools I can afford, even if they aren’t top of the line. If I’d cheapened out, I’d get exactly what I deserved.

To call Hurricane Sandy a disruption is much like saying there’s a bit of water in the subway tunnels—accurate, but selling the event far, far too short. When you consider the lives that have been not so much disrupted as destroyed by the storm, the people even now, a week later, homeless, powerless, and cold, the amount of disruption I took would not even register on any calibrated scale. Namely, I lost Internet for a few hours, had to work from home one day, and face crowded and delayed subway trains for a few more days. By every measure, I got lucky. [1]

Disruption happens, willfully, and otherwise. When I moved to New York, I willfully disrupted my own life. When I took my new job, I willfully disrupted the routines I’d set up for myself. Trying to put these things to rights has been a challenge, and it has been, all my life. Why, then, should this be any different?

The ability to recover from disruption gracefully, as well as having restraint, focus, and the need to succeed can be summarized, neatly, in one simple term: grit. Those who are grittier [2] are far better at keeping themselves on the narrow path that goes between themselves and where they want to be, than those who are not. I’m not going to give a complete overview of grit, and how to cultivate it, or the benefits of it, when others have done it much better. I’m simply making a point.

Even as I write this, after missing a week of posting on this site due to the dual disruptions of Sandy and my new job, I’m facing another external disruption to my daily life in the form of another severe storm, dumping a load of wet snow on top of an already battered metropolis. This isn’t anything I’m not prepared for, having lived in this climate, just a hundred or so miles to the southeast, all my life. I’ll make it to work, and back, without any problems.

However, as I write this, I’ve got another thing gnawing at the back of me, with regards to the nature of commitment and what I should be doing. The brilliant Patrick Rhone made a guest post on A Better Mess on doing less with your day, or to put it better, cutting down what you have to do during the day so you can maximize the time you spend actually living your life. This was followed by a related episode of the Enough podcast. There may be another essay in here, on my end, but with regards to disruption…

When you’re trying to recover, you step back and look at what you’re putting back together, and in the process, one simply can’t help noticing ways to put it together in a different way. The things that make up a day are like LEGO bricks—a set that’s not just boring rectangular prism blocks, but also those crazy pieces that let you put stuff at odd angles, weirdly shaped plates, and weird specialty pieces from the really awesome spaceship set you got for your birthday. Without the manual, how you put them together is up to you, though of course you have to work within the constraints of what’s available to you. [3] This leaves you with a mathematically ridiculous amount of options, though.

I’m recovering and rebuilding after this disruption in my life. It’s not physical rebuilding, like so many less fortunate people have to do now, and if I dared to call it just as taxing, I would be insulting those who got the worst of it. In doing so, however, there’s the silver lining in seeing how I can change things to improve, and maybe even mitigate the effects of the next big disruption in my life. Fingers crossed, and toes crossed there. The first step is to know what my priorities are. One is, of course, to get the words out of my head, and on to the page. Another is to take care of myself, physically and financially. The third is to live my life.

The rest is implementation. That’s the hard part.

I’ve arrived late to the party on App.net, which used to be the Twitter alternative for people with $50 to spare. Now, it’s the Twitter alternative for people with $36 to spare. My initial unwillingness to join App.net came from the fifty dollars it cost to join the service in its earliest days. While some recent decisions on behalf of Twitter’s management had—and have—me grumbling, App.net’s price tag kept me from making the jump. Now I have a new job that ostensibly involves social media. With those things in mind, I figured it would be worthwhile to give it a try. I whipped out the debit card, registered my username [1], and started following a bunch of people—mostly those I follow on Twitter, and installed a couple of client apps.

I’ll get to the application experience later, but in the week I’ve been on App.net, it’s left me wondering just what the heck I expected to get out of it. The good news about App.net is that it’s still small enough that I can get some serendipitous connections just by posting. A post asking for advice on Mac clients got a reply from someone who, I presume, saw it on the global feed. Another post about help with TextExpander eventually got the attention of the famous @shawnblanc. The days when you could have something like that happen on Twitter were over about the time I signed up, if not months before. Also, it is nice to use, and the conversation is much more focused than Twitter—the latter being, again I suspect, more a function of the small user base. I also do like the 256 character post limit, but I’m surprisingly terse on these services anyway.

App.net’s third-party apps are of varying quality, most of them in a rough beta stage. The best desktop client I’ve found, thanks to user @aaandy, is Wedge. While a little clunky, and clearly feature-incomplete, what it does do, it does well, and is nice to look at. On my iPhone, I’ve been using Tapbots Netbot. Netbot is a joy to use, and it should be. It’s just their amazing Twitter client, Tweetbot, slightly modified to use App.net, and works the same, right down to the UI. [2] I’ve not wanted for a good Twitter client experience, but the way Twitter’s treating third-party clients makes me think I will be wanting in the future. App.net has me covered.

The problem with App.net for me, is that there’s very little there. Admittedly, I’m following 18 users, compared to the 113 I follow on Twitter. I also have four users following me,[3] limiting the amount of expected interaction on any posts. Almost everyone I follow on App.net, I also follow on Twitter, and all but one of them uses Twitter far more than App.net. This means that if I want to know what, say, Jim Dalrymple thinks about the new iPad mini, I have to go to Twitter, and not App.net. And that’s just for the people on both services! When it comes to actually having stuff to see and read, Twitter is where the action is, and I don’t see that changing any time soon. App.net is where the geeks play, and while I am a proud geek, most of the people I care about and follow are not.

Which throws another social media service into the mix: Facebook, which I have discussed before, more than once. Facebook is where my real friends are—the ones who I see in the flesh on a regular basis, share drinks, handshakes, and hugs with. If I want to know what they’re up to, and I do, I either have to go to Facebook, or live in the dark. For me, Facebook is where the action is, followed by Twitter. However, I can say that App.net is more lively than Google+.

Twitter and Facebook, offer me two different, but slightly overlapping audiences. What I post on either service is targeted to the people on the service I post it on. Sometimes, I post the same thing to both. Who is my audience on App.net? Because of its size, its simultaneously everyone and no one. This leaves me with little to use it for, and what I do use it for, will often be cross-posted to Twitter. I’d like to find a niche for all of these, App.net especially, as it is an investment of $36 per year, and the $4.99 I spent on NetBot. I don’t want this to be a waste of time and money. For now, however, my attention is going to have to go where the action is.

Boris cuts my hair.

Boris is a Russian immigrant, and looks the part. A hulking rock of a man, with black hair, and a thick black mustache whose corners come down to the edge of his lips. The mustache, up close, has a few silver hairs in it, as does the hair visible beyond the edges of his kippah. He wears a barbers smock, white with blue line drawings of scissors, razors, mirrors, jars of Barbicide. His accent is thick. English is not his first language. And yet, he is friendly, polite, well spoken, if terse.

And he wields the fastest pair of scissors in the Borough of Queens. Possibly, in the entire city. Fast enough, I’d say, that he could hold down a second job as a Cuisinart.

One of the first things on my list once I arrived in my new home was to find a good barber shop. Back in Philadelphia, as my move grew closer, I put off getting a haircut. I’d twice tried to go to my old barbers in Center City, but found they were closed. Once, it was my fault for forgetting they were closed on Sundays. The other time, I don’t know why they were closed. I was depressed, my hair was long and shaggy, and I decided it would be an added incentive to find a barber shop once I moved.

During my college years, I had long hair. I grew a wild mane that, at one point, fell down to the top of my backside. When it was time to remove it, I went to a proper hair salon, spending fifty dollars to have a professional cut and style it. Money well spent. While I was comfortably well off, I kept going back to her, but this grew unsustainable. I went to the local beauty school, paying students to cut my hair, unsure of what I was getting. I gave them up when I found my barber shop. For sixteen bucks, they cut my hair, trimmed my sideburns and eyebrows, and did it quickly.

There’s a risk in trying any new place to get a haircut. Before settling on my barber in Philly, I poured over Yelp reviews. I didn’t want to go just anywhere, and take my chance. I only get a haircut every six weeks or so… more like “or so” for me. I didn’t want to travel out of my way, or pay out the nose if I didn’t have to. I had made my home, but it was doomed to be temporary, knowing I would be moving after only a handful of cuts.

I found Boris by near serendipity. Yes, I used Yelp, but I didn’t discover his shop immediately. Not far, down on Jamaica Avenue, there’s another barber shop, one famous for its cuts. I was all set to make the hike down there, only to find out that they focused on a different clientele, and didn’t provide the sort of haircut I was looking for. Dejected, I returned to the Internet.

There was one review of Boris’s shop, but it was glowing. Five stars. Excited. One bright, warm, Thursday morning in late Summer, I made the hike. It’s a mile from my building to Union Turnpike and 162nd Street. The shop is unassuming. No name, just a pale red awning with the words “Barber Shop”, and a rotating red, white, and blue barber’s pole by the door. I thought it may have been closed, but looking in, I saw Boris. I entered, was seated in a red leather barber chair, enrobed in a black barber’s cloth.

I told him to take an inch off the top. Clippers on the back and sides. Trim my sideburns, but keep them the same length. Out came the clippers, at a 3. I felt my hair slip away, the weight holding it down going with it. We spoke, politely. I told him I was new to the neighborhood, came from Philadelphia. He told me about his trip to see the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall.

Then, out came the scissors.

A few tentative test snips in the air, first, like a batter taking a practice swing before the pitch. I felt him take up some hair, and then felt a swish of air, followed by a quiet click. Again. Again. Hair flew away from me like leaves on the wind. He adjusted my head, kept snipping away, and before I knew what had happened, he handed me my glasses, and I could see what this man had wrought.

And I looked, and I saw that it was good.

Boris asked for ten dollars, a price that seemed, as I looked and preened in the giant mirror, far too good to be true, especially for New York. Walking out the door, and back home, I felt like a new man, holding my head high—easier to do without two months of hair growth weighing it down, and singing the praises of Boris. I’ve been back since, and I will be back again.

What does it mean to be nice?

It might be easier to say what being nice doesn’t mean. Being nice is not the same as being milquetoast. It doesn’t mean not having firm, honest opinions. It doesn’t mean being someone people walk all over. It also doesn’t mean the Minnesota nice of passive aggression. To me, being nice, as a virtue, is about two things: discretion and delivery. Discretion is the fine art of knowing what to say, how to say it, and when. A quick example is, say, the person next to you at work constantly playing loud, terrible music at you. It’s very easy to walk over and yell at them. It’s easy to be passive-aggressive and turn your music up, or theirs down when they go to the bathroom. As I mentioned last week, however, these aren’t likely to affect someone else’s behavior. A carefully worded, polite, friendly comment, with a proposed behavior suggestion for both of you is more likely to be effective.

Unless they’re an unrepentant jerk, but those are rarer than we imagine.

Discretion is also about where we say things. You’re polite, one hopes, to the jerk with the bad music taste in the office. At home, to your partner, you can let it spill. Every social environment has its own level of acceptable discourse about itself and its inhabitants. I’ve been in work environments where taking the piss out of your co-workers was de rigeur, and places where a misplaced word can have long-term consequences. If you’re not sure, a safe default is “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.”

This is hard stuff, especially at first. If you’re used to being brusque and callous to the point where it’s second nature, try faking it until you make it. With practice—and I do not suggest trying this without practicing first—fake niceness (without the layer of passive-aggression) is indistinguishable enough from the real thing. In any job that involves face-to-face interaction with a fickle and often rude public, dealing with a friendly face, even if it’s an act, is often enough to bring some of the rudest people to their senses. If you’ve ever been to a Disney theme park, you’ve likely seen this in action. David Foster Wallace called it the “Professional Smile,” and noted the effect not receiving it has on how you walk away from an interaction: it’s not good.

Don’t expect to change the way you think of people, and certainly not overnight. What is more important is how you act with people. Given enough time, it’s possible that you will become sincere and nice in how you deal with people. Maybe. Once it feels real to you, as long as there’s no nagging guilt that inevitably comes with a bad interaction, and as long as the person you’re dealing with walks away with a positive impression, you’re doing the right thing. Like so much, this all comes down to mindfulness. Taking a step back from your actions and being aware of the choices you make in interacting with others goes a long way to ensuring you come off as nice. There are enough proverbs about the utility of holding ones tongue that it’s pointless to repeat them here. Remember: you do have a choice about what to say and how to say it. Take time and aim. When you shoot your mouth off from the hip, as it were, you risk missing, and you risk hurting yourself and others. This isn’t cheap, liberal arts relativism. It’s dealing with people.

And, hey, I’m not perfect. Nor do I aspire to be. However, the day will come, sooner than later, when a perfect confluence of events will tax my patience to the limit. My alarm clock won’t go off. The subway will break down, making me late for work. I won’t have had my morning coffee. I’ll find out I had an appointment I forgot about. The cashier won’t give me my change when I got lunch. It rained and I forgot an umbrella. Then, someone will say something to push me over the edge. How one deals with that is the ultimate test of how well you can maintain your niceness.

There’s a time and place to say your piece, and a time and a place to shut your mouth. Generally, unsolicited comments don’t go over well with the recipient, whether you deliver it in a friendly manner, or a sotto voiced rejoinder after an encounter. In cases like these, it’s best to learn to let it go, and not let these things get to you. After all, “what do you care?” In those cases where someone sincerely wants an opinion, don’t be cruel. Be honest, be frank, and be sincere, but by no means be cruel. Everybody has a reason why they do what they do. That doesn’t mean you understand it. It also doesn’t mean they understand it. When dealing with other people, unless you’re Charles Xavier, you don’t have the ability to control how they think or act. You can encourage and suggest, but the way you do it will have a huge impact on how well it goes over. And there are no guarantees.

This is hard. It’s hard to balance being nice with being honest, and being strong. It’s hard to bite your tongue when someone’s goading you, directly or indirectly. It’s very hard to get that angry, threatened part of your brain to stand down. Hard, however, is not the same as impossible. It all comes back to mindfulness. Slow down, step back, think before you speak, or type, or click “Submit” and see if this is going to actually help matters. And, of course, in the event you do blow it and wreck someone’s mood, step on someone’s toes, and make the situation worse, rather than feed the cycle, apologize and move on. Or, just move on, if you have to. I think, however, the results of being nice pay off in the long run, far better than the initial pleasures of snark. Try it for yourself, and see.