I fucking hate this brand.

You know who wears FCUK t-shirts? Late 30s, early 40s post-spawning house-wives who used to be socially relevant back in their late teens and early twenties. By wearing FCUK t-shirts, they feel all edgy and risque without actually risking any sort of public censure, since it’s ‘Really just an acronym for “French Connection UK”, don’t you know ANYTHING’, and so they can wear these crappy mass-produced branded t-shirts over their fake tanned desperately post-partum gym-toned bodies while bemoaning the smell of the homeless and drinking their second-from-the-top-of-the-list (the top of the list is cheapest, no-one wants that!) kardon-ey in their trendy local cafes before going home to their darling little urban pad and quietly drinking themselves into semi-insensibility as they mourn the death of the lives they once had.

Fuck FCUK.

This morning I woke from a dream where I was first observing, then assisting with a relationship between Tilda Swinton (or a character played by her), and a guy who looked like a soap opera doctor – all trustworthy moustache and traditional suit.

In dreams, my perspective often shifts from third to first person. I start observing, then become a part of the scenario. The viewpoint becomes me. Sometimes, as the scene evolves, I step away, becoming only a viewpoint again.

Before getting up, before coming fully awake, this seemed like a profound metaphor for life. Now, I’m not so sure, but I’m glad to have recorded it.

Some mornings I wake up, and manage to tell myself to go back to sleep. While I feel more rested on those days, I also feel somehow less present, less material. Days when I start early, when I get some things done (even if they’re things that don’t need to be done) before the rest of the world wakes up, I feel smarter, more upbeat, more lively, more motivated to move things forward.

Whether it’s true or not, feeling smarter for the day makes me want to act smarter, do the right things, be the person I want to be. Asking myself “Is this the best thing for me to be doing right now?”, then acting on the answer. These days, more than ever, I struggle with having too many things I want to have done, not enough time to do them, so there’s a need to pick the most appropriate things to focus on, leaving the least appropriate to a tomorrow, and acknowledging that that tomorrow may see them languish again.

Toast eaten, coffee half drunk. Time to go to work. Oh, and there’s the alarm, the scheduled vibrating ducks.

http://pragmetric.com/ – Primary business, IT Management consulting.

http://orsonkent.com/ – Photography business site. Includes a weblog with infrequent updates.

http://lifesans.com/ – here. Weblog about life, minimalism, technology, entrepreneurship and art.

http://obvioustshirts.com/ – T-shirts I create. I think they’re funny. I’m hoping that one day, someone might buy one. Until then, I’m still amused by making them.

http://icanstories.com/ – Very new, just getting started here (and looking for contributions). Positive historical stories, hopefully inspirational.
http://twitter.com/orsonkent – My primary twitter account.

http://orsonkent.tumblr.com/ – Tumblog, things that interest me, things I want to share.

http://padfaq.com/ – iPad related news, linkblog to which I contribute.

http://www.redbubble.com/people/OrsonKent – the fulfilment site for art and t-shirts

http://OrsonKent.imagekind.com/ – An alternate fulfilment site – photo art only.
I’m there there’s a couple more somewhere, but I can’t think of them offhand.

Geeks of the more hard-core techie variety are quite fond of pointing out how ‘crap’ it is, based on some of the numbers associated with the hardware – CPU clock speed, amount of ram. Of course, they do the same with the iPhone.

Of course, these are basically the same conversation, just about different sets of numbers (one dollars, one techie). They also both miss the point.

The media, picking apart the device and calculating what the individual hardware components are worth, is missing the point that the device as a whole is worth more than the sum of its parts. The geeks are looking at raw numbers, and comparing them to those associated with other devices (laptops, desktops, perhaps smartphones), and declaring that the hardware is inadequate.

The hardware can’t be considered in isolation, it has to be evaluated in conjunction with the operating system it runs. And this is where the pure numbers fall down.

By way of example: if I tell you about a car with an inline, 4 cylinder, 2.9 litre (177 cubic inch) engine, you’ll probably compare that to other vehicle engines that you happen to know some of the numbers of, and assume that it’s a moderately capable car, able to handle freeway and city driving quite adequately.

Unfortunately you’d be wrong – I’m talking about the engine of a Model T Ford. The numbers don’t tell the whole story.

Where Apple excel, is in making device operating systems better than they have been before. In particular, there’s a focus on making the operating system and hardware work together, as optimally as possible. In the real world, this is what matters – but there’s no real metric for this, no numbers to compare.

Years ago, when I first switched to Mac and OS X, I switched from a fairly powerful Linux desktop computer, with a pair of 17″ monitors, to a much smaller computer with a single 15″ screen. My Linux environment was configured for me, by me, to be as efficient as I could make it, so I could get the most done in as little time as possible. Yet, within a week, I was getting more done on the Mac than I ever had under Linux or Windows. The real world experience made a lie of the numbers.

I don’t yet have a iPad. I’m not enough of a fanboy to pay the premium to import one, but I’m probably enough of an enthusiast that I’ll be lined up to buy one the first day that they’re available over here. What I’ve read indicates that Apple has repeated its earlier successes. Negative comments seem to be based around false assumptions: that the numbers matter, or that the iPad is designed to replace a full computer (more on this later, once I can speak with some actual experience on the subject). Positive comments seem to be based on the hard-to-measure ‘User Experience’, the area in which Apple, traditionally, has been well ahead of their competitors.

In the real world, it’s the user experience that matters. Not the numbers attached to the components, not the cost of the hardware – simply, how good the product is to use.

Right now, there’s a heavily ‘family friendly’ vibe exuding from the content gatekeepers at Apple. I’m not a fan of this for any numbers of reasons, but I can see why they do it, why this direction has been handed down from on high. Apple is selling the content. If someone’s going to get sued for providing something, well, they’ve got the deepest pockets, they’ll probably be first on the list, and for whatever reason, they’re not prepared to be a test case just yet.

However, Apple will be well aware that adult entertainment is one of the key drivers for technology adoption.

My prediction, is that there will be a section of the so-called walled garden designed to allow adult content. Access to that part of the garden will be restricted in some ‘hard enough’ to get around manner, preventing most of those for whom access is not allowed from entry.

For some reason, most publishers* set the price of e-books at very similar to the price of the paper books. I don’t get why.

When they create an ebook, they create it once. It then effectively copies itself. The biggest expense after that point in time is probably in the bookkeeping to track sales and see the cash rolling in. Sure, there’s a little bit of server maintenance and bandwidth cost, but that’s negligible.

When they create a paper book, the have to create one copy for every sale. Not only that, but these copies have to be sent to the end customer, probably through 3 or 4 other sets of hands (each one of which adds a little bit of markup) that the customer ends up paying. I understand why the price of a paper book is so high. What doesn’t seem to be justified, to me, is the price of an ebook being roughly the same, especially when it has less utility (such as, it’s designed to be impossible for me to loan a book to a friend).

I understand why they do this. Politely, it’s called “gouging”. I simply don’t like it, and my motives are purely selfish – I want to buy more books for the same amount of money, and it seems to me that e-books, because they’re Bit Based not Atom based should be a lot cheaper than they are. It doesn’t mean I spend more with them, I simply buy fewer books. Sure, talk to the PR side of a publishing company, and they’ll tell you it’s a niche market, with not many sales. My bet is, if the books were priced at a 10th of what they are now, they’d sell more than 10 times as many. They’d get more money overall. The author would get more money overall (and that’s the person I really care about – publishers add comparatively little value to my reading experience).

Physical books are a luxury item. I understand that, I respect it; I’ve always lived with it. I understand the expense of getting the words from the author to me when it’s constrained by being a collection of atoms. For some books, I want the physical form. For others, I just want the content, the soul of the book.

The soul of a book needn’t be a luxury. e-books should be far, far cheaper than they are, growing the market, increasing the numbers of readers, the volume of book sales.

I don’t know how much an author makes, on average, from a given book. I’d be happy if the price of a book was, ooh, say, about twice that. At heart, I’m a capitalist, and I do see an amount of value added by publishers – they should, in fact, must, be able to make a profit. If they paid the author an advance, they’ve also taken a risk, and if they’ve taken the risk on the right content, they deserve some reward for it.

Right now, it seems to me that the reward is disproportionate to the reward attached to more traditional book forms. I’d like that to change. I’d like e-books to be one of the driving factors behind a renaissance of the written word as a form of mass-entertainment.

* Baen seem to be the prime exception to this rule. I’m sure there are others, most likely in genre fiction. I’m mostly talking about the more mainstream ‘name brand’ publishers – the lesser known brands are already ahead of the game, much like some indie music labels were years ago with digital downloads.

Given that I work in IT, and have done for many years, not having backups is pretty much an inexcusable case of the cobbler’s children having no shoes.

Given that I hadn’t really updated this site too actively in some time, I’m also intending something of a repurpose, a generalisation of intent.  In short, content will still cover what it has, but will also cover other things I feel inspired to write about.