When I woke up on New Year’s Day and pulled my iPhone, running Sleep Cycle, out from under the covers, I noticed the crescent moon in my status bar that indicates “Do Not Disturb” mode was still on. This struck me as slightly odd, as it was scheduled to turn off at seven in the morning, a full three and a half hours before I actually woke up. [1] In the time, I missed a bunch of New Years text messages, but no phone calls. Thinking nothing of it, I switched Do Not Disturb back off, got up, and started doing a little relaxed, early morning reading on my iPad.

A few articles in on Flipboard, I noticed the crescent on the iPad’s status bar too. I turned it off, and resumed my reading. Then, I came across an article on the problem. That, I guess, explained that. If it’s a bug, then it’s a damned useful one. Like anyone who had been out ringing in the new year, the last thing I wanted was my phone buzzing for some reason or another and waking me before I was ready. It’s exactly the sort of “I didn’t know I wanted it until I had it” feature that makes Apple products so useful.

That Apple put out a new ad touting the Do Not Disturb feature today makes me believe even more that this was intentional. Though, I could be wrong. Working for a startup company, even in a non-technical role, has taught me a few things about software development—the sort of axiomatic things that you hear but never experience until you’re in that world. I’m talking about stuff like the Ninety-ninety rule. The larger, more complicated, and more interrelated any system is, the more likely a small change in a component part can cause trouble elsewhere, and if that trouble is, itself, small, it can easily escape notice.

You know the show-stopping bugs when they happen. Your screen turns blue or black. A box comes up with an indecipherable error message. All the data in a folder suddenly vanishes without a trace. These are the ones that you drop everything to fix, without even creating an issue in your bug tracker. The little ones… they’re harder to spot. Even a company like Apple can have trouble with those. Whether it was an overlooked bug, or a secret easter egg feature, I certainly didn’t mind not having my sleep interrupted. A new year begins best after a good night’s sleep. And bug-crushing is easier when you’re well rested.

It’s hard to find a good blog these days.

Not that there’s any shortage of good blogs, and that’s, in fact, half of the problem. The other half is finding them, or more specifically, finding the ones that scratch my personal itch. I find reading other writers to be a vital tool to inspiring me to write—at least for fiction. A good novel or short story has a tendency to get me writing something. So, I often seek out good fiction. I recently finished reading Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov. I picked that up because it was mentioned in Of Course, You End Up Becoming Yourself, the amazing and sad long-form interview with the late and lamented David Foster Wallace by David Lipsky. I picked that book up because I love David Foster Wallace. I love David Foster Wallace because a friend turned me on to him due to a shared love of Haruki Murakami. I discovered Haruki Murakami by sheer chance, flipping through a book of contemporary Japanese short stories at Central Branch of the Free Library of Philadelphia in my college days.

It’s easy to find a good book, though sometimes I will drag my feet when it comes to reading one. It’s much the same with music. I’m a passionate music fan, but I approach a new band with a certain wariness, happy to sit in the little musical rut I’ve created for myself. Whenever I hear a lot of good buzz around a band or an artist, I get suspicious. I had been told multiple times by multiple people that I would adore the band Sparks, for example. I put off listening to them for ages, but when I did, it didn’t take long for Sparks to quickly become not just a favorite band, but my second favorite band of all time.

How It Was in the Past

Many moons ago, when the Internet was a young, wild frontier that spread out upon a metaphorical prairie stretching to an infinitely distant horizon, it wasn’t hard to keep on top of what was new. Yahoo! began life as an Internet directory, and you could even see what new pages had been added to the Internet each day. By the time I got online around 1997, this was no longer quite the case, but other directories abounded. In fact, my first website was on the now defunct GeoCities, which organized sites by a system of virtual addresses on streets in various themed neighborhoods. When I moved out, the address my site used was taken over by a Dukes of Hazzard fan page. Directories were even useful in the age of blogging. When I set up this site, I had it added to nycbloggers.com, a directory of New York City bloggers, arranged by subway stop. It’s still listed there, under the subway stop by my first college.

Still, as more and more people got online, and more people started posting things, and there were more ways to start websites that were easier and cheaper, it became harder to find cool stuff. I spent a lot of this period on LiveJournal, which made it easy to find people who might be into the same things you were, which isn’t the same thing as finding good writing about those things, but it’s the closest I’ve come. The best part it that a lot of this discovery was mostly organic. I found interesting people who shared my interests and turned me on to new ones.

Anil Dash hit me in his “The Web We Lost” essay, but his lament comes from the technical side of things. I never bothered with Technorati tags in my attempts at blogging—in fact, I always considered tags to be a kludgy and ugly way to organize writing. Still, the early days of “Web 2.0” were all about discovery of content, and now that’s fallen away. The buzzword now is curation, which is fine, but I think there’s a place left for writing, long and short form.

What scratches the itch right now

I organize my RSS feeds in a system similar to Patrick Rhone’s. In my “A-List” folder, I keep Daring Fireball, Marco.org, The Brooks Review, Minimal Mac, and 43 Folders on the off-chance that Merlin will start posting there again. I keep a “B-List” of sites like Metafilter and Boing Boing that post cool stuff, but also have a fair amount of non-signal posts that don’t interest me. This folder also holds other blogs that sometimes post neat stuff. Beyond that, there’s a folder for the friends whose blogs I follow, a folder of miscellaneous blogs that post items of interest or amusement such as bands and humor sites. Then, there’s my big-ass folder of webcomic RSS feeds.

The blogs that I follow in the A-List have certain things in common: a distinct voice, and an interest in technology and Apple products. These are not requirements, however. What is a requirement is a willingness to write long, in-depth articles on things that catch their attention. It doesn’t hurt that most of them are podcasters, too, and I listen to their shows. Sometimes, they link to interesting things, with a short blurb and/or quote, but the thing that draws me to them is not what they link to, but what they write. When I bemoan finding good blogs, I bemoan the difficulty finding blogs that do the long-form writing. I can get links anywhere. That’s why they have [Reddit].

RSS Versus Twitter Versus Whatever Else

A while back, I remember reading of people bemoaning RSS readers, and giving up subscribing to blogs in lieu of having people cultivate links for them via Twitter, or whatever. There’s been a recent trend in e-mail newsletters, like Dave Pell’s NextDraft, which I subscribe to. Apps like Flipboard can scrape out the links from my Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr feeds and put them in a shiny, magazine-like UI for me.

Maybe I’m just old school, but I like RSS readers. I don’t see it as an obligation to get to the bottom of the pile, though I do anyway. I launch my reader of choice, Reeder, when I want to read something. When I’m done, I close it. It only fetches things when I run it, and I’ve disabled the litle red notification dots on my iPad and iPhone so that I don’t have anything nudging me to read the things I neglected. Thanks to Instapaper, if something piques my interest, I can save it for later, and read it on the subway. I don’t care how often they update. I want good, interesting writing about the things I care about, or a writer who is capable of making me care about new things.

And that’s hard to find. But I know they’re out there. When there’s one, or five, there’s even more.

I recently read an interesting article on dopamine, and our addiction to seeking information. As the proud owner of an iPhone and an iPad, and as someone with a Twitter account, a Facebook account, an App.net account, 78 RSS feeds in Google Reader, and three main e-mail accounts, I have to admit that it hit home. I’ve fallen down the Wikipedia Rabbithole. I’ve been on Reddit until stupid o’clock in the morning. I’ve gone to the bathroom, and checked all my major social networks in the space of a single micturition. I do these things daily. Multiple times.

I am the rat pressing the button, not knowing if this next press will produce the food/electrical shock to the pleasure center of my brain. Eventually, it will get to the point where I will go insane, or break the cycle. Clearly the latter is the better option.

The solution might be as “easy” as three months at a meditation retreat, but that’s not something all of us can pull off, for multiple reasons. Still, it’s probably telling that I read Michael W. Taft’s story of how a meditation retreat helped his brain recover from “being full,” and the more medically oriented article on dopamine and seeking I mentioned above. This problem is the same reason Stephen Hackett is turning off his iPhone for a year, or The Verge’s Paul Miller leaving the entire Internet for a year. These people are jumping out the emergency hatch for a certain period, deliberately defecting to other side in a technological war on boredom that has already been won.

Despite being the sort of person to quit my job, pack up my life, and move to a new city without a job or much of a backup plan, I’m not the sort for extreme solutions to problems. I’d rather adjust my relationship to the gadgets that tug on my brain than throw them away completely. One thing I’ve done is switch to using Twitter and App.net exclusively on my iPhone and iPad. [1] I’ve also started using my time on the subway as time to “be disconnected” either reading a book[2] or just not doing anything at all.

Even after only a couple of days, the results are positive. It may be too early to tell, but I’ve found myself with ideas for writing, fiction and otherwise. Even better, I’m getting off the subway and simply feeling better and less stressed. With less inputs, and less chance to seek inputs, my brain has to let go of the dopamine and wind itself down. An hour a day on the train will probably never be enough. This is the sort of thing where meditation, or other practices may help. Hell, this is one of those things where turning off the Wi-Fi may help.

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.

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.