I opted to pick up our iPad at the Apple Store in Austin, since we’ll be in that general area when it’s released, and it might be fun to shop for accessories at the same time. We’ve shopped at this store before, and know the parking is exceptionally easy, which is why I picked that one. We may be staying in New Braunfels, which is closer to San Antonio, but what the heck? Either way we’d have to get in the car and drive for an hour, so the direction we head in doesn’t make much difference.

Apparently I was not the only person a little bit excited about getting my name on the list of early adopters. Mashable said there were an estimated 51,000 iPads sold in the first two hours, and 90,000 on the first day of preorders! Not too shabby for a device the pundits kept wondering why anyone would want one. I know why I want one, of course. I’ve got a Kindle DX, and I have been very disappointed with it. While we do use it, most of the time I prefer to fire up Windows 7 in a VirtualBox window and use Kindle for PC to read my Amazon ebooks. When my iPad arrives, I’ll just use Kindle for iPhone on that instead, unless Amazon has a native iPad app ready by then. Color and a backlit screen make the reading experience so much better for me than eInk’s grainy, low-contrast screen that requires a strong reading light. I really don’t understand at all those people who say it’s harder to read an LED computer display than an eInk device or paper. They seem to get their data from the bad old days of CRTs with flickering, unshielded UV-radiant screens. Silly.

As an ebook reader, I certainly expect the iPad to be the best of the breed, but that’s not the only reason I want one. It will be a superb portfolio display, too. And using Reunion for iPhone combined with a collection of family photos, it will be the star of any family gathering. Oh, the possibilities just keep growing….

One of my primary objectives for having this device, especially the 3G version, is to supplement our very pricey VerizonWireless Mobile Broadband account. While that has been a real lifesaver on the occasions, like this past week, when we are in a place without acceptable internet connectivity, only 5 gigabytes of throughput for a month just isn’t enough, not by a long shot. Figure that only two Netflix streaming video movies would use the whole month’s allowance and you’ll understand. We simply use the internet too intensively to be happy with that kind of parsimony. AT&T’s iPad unlimited data plan, which we can turn off when we’re happy with local WiFi, will be wonderful. Phil will be able to watch movies, I’ll be able to get all the video tutorials and podcasts I want, and all the rest, without paying Verizon twice their already excessive monthly fee for using 1/5th more bandwidth, like we have the past couple of months. After all, as many people around the world have said, internet access is a basic human right.

So, we expect to really, really, really enjoy this device when it finally arrives!

It got me to thinking about the differences between these various methods of self-expression and communication. It’s true that all these social media/social networking sites are attractive, but for different reasons, and possibly different reasons exist for different people, or different moods in the same person. I like Twitter for its immediacy and the ease of very short form updates. I like Facebook because it makes it easy to share photos and my Twitter feed, and for the interactions in comments on my page and those of my contacts. LinkedIn is a good place to keep my expanded résumé, and offers what may be more serious discussion forums than I’ve found elsewhere (although I find I don’t have time to follow them). The dozens of Ning networks I’ve signed up for took a lot of my attention for a few weeks earlier this year, but now I rarely look at them.

For me, my blogs are completely different from the networks I belong to. When I do post blog entries, they tend to be longer and better researched than social network posts, which might explain why I don’t write them as often. It’s a bigger commitment of time and effort. Blogs also have a more permanent feeling to them, with several years’ worth of entries available in their archives, while Twitter and Facebook postings quickly scroll off the page, sometimes in just a few hours, and certainly in no more than days. Indeed, some Twitter users, like Jay Rosen of New York University’s Journalism Institute have been agitating recently for Twitter to provide a searchable archive of past tweets, which highlights the fact that such an archive doesn’t exist.

As we used to say on the pre-Web BBS, YMMV (Your Milage May Vary), but for me there’s a time and place for all these expressive outlets, and I’ll keep using them at least until the next greatest thing comes along.

I’ll have more to say about it later, but for now you can tell I’m having fun. So much to read, so little time….

When I got to the meeting place, I saw my friend Piet Hut, who is the group’s founder. He’s in Japan right now, so the time of day was downright normal for him to be out and about. The other person there tonight lives in Australia, so her clock is also on a diurnal schedule. But even us nightowls can always find somebody awake in a virtual world whenever we decide to go there.

Anyway, the person I’d been twittering with earlier, Wan-Qi Kim, is involved in teaching meditation, etc. so I had suggested he might like to visit Kira Café. I think it would be fascinating to introduce these two brilliant men, but don’t know if I can lure Wan into SL to do so, and catch Piet there at the same time. Maybe someday. If it’s meant to be, it will happen.

First, I had to choose a WordPress “widget” to use. There are at least 20 in the WordPress website, and who knows how many more elsewhere on the Web. I settled on Twitter Widget Pro by Aaron D. Campbell, but after installing it I got a fatal error message, so I went to the author’s blog and read the comments about this app. Aaron is good at replying, and sure enough, several other people had the same problem. The solution was to use PHP 5.2+, but according to the readout on my site’s control panel, I was using the latest and greatest… So, it was off to the Knowledgebase on my webhost’s support site. Ah ha! Even though the latest version was shown to be available, the default was to use PHP 4.x! So, I had to rummage around and find the place to make it default to version 5. That done, the widget worked like a charm (aside from being a little slow updating).

So, now that I know what I’m doing, it’s time to add this widget to another blog I’m working on, one for a new ePublishing venture. Oops, sorry, we’re not ready to launch that site yet, so I can’t give you a link, but rest assured that when it is time, I’ll post about it here, and on Twitter and other places as well.

But that leads me to another topic. Since I started a new Twitter account for the new venture, now I’m in the market for a Twitter client that will not only allow all three of us involved to post to its account, but will also let me easily manage multiple accounts I’m using. It could get messy, especially since I’m involved in yet another ePublishing venture and will want an account for that one, too. I found something that looks promising, CoTweet, but it is still in private beta so it could be a while before I can try it. Since the new Twitter accounts aren’t active yet, though, I can afford to wait.

Twitter and WordPress are not the only online communications tools out there, of course. You may have noticed another addition to this site, a collection of icons at the end of each blog posting. This widget was (thank goodness!) very straightfoward to install. It’s called Sociable. The configuration page for that widget offers a plethora of linked icons for an enormous array of social networks, including of course Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn as well as email and your printer. As dynamic as social networking tools are, though, new ones are always popping up. No problem! Sociable allows you to create your own icons and link them to sites you choose. It doesn’t get much more flexible than that.

At the same time all this is going on, I’ve been working with a new volunteer at the International Spaceflight Museum who is taking over our exhibit sponsorship auctions on eBay. Our original “auctioneer”, Opal Lei (Second Life name), bowed out after working very hard to not only set up the auctions, but also scripted signs in Second Life that display the sponsor’s name and automatically reset when the sponsorship expires. She also wrote up very clear instructions for her successor, making it not just easier, but possible, for someone to follow her footsteps without going completely crazy trying to figure it all out. She even did an inventory of all our exhibits, which she put in a wiki! Those early auctions kept the museum solvent for months, but since they ended we’ve struggled to pay the bills. So finding a replacement auctioneer has been a true blessing. I just hope we can get his first round of auctions rolling in time to avoid losing the islands, since the rent is due next week. If you’re interested in helping, either by sponsoring an exhibit or simply donating, please visit our website for more info on how to do that. We have a PayPal donor button as well as info on the auctions and even a Google spreadsheet that shows our current (sorry) state of financial affairs.

While mentioning the ISM and communications, I would be remiss to not also mention a new book by a friend of mine, Kimberly Rufer-Bach, The Second Life Grid: The Official Guide to Communication, Collaboration, and Community Engagement. She interviewed me for a case study on how the ISM uses a wide variety of Web tools to manage our world-wide distributed nonprofit organization, and according to another friend, Dave Taylor, the ISM was featured very prominently in the book, perhaps getting the most space of any of the case studies she includes. I’ll find out for sure next week when my copy arrives.

Got all that? Good. I’ll stop writing now and get back to work. Thank you for your attention.

Sparkle is a virtual worlds (VW) client for the iPhone that allows the user to login and communicate via instant messages with friends, and via proximity chat with avatars that are in the same location. Sorry, you probably need to try a VW like Second Life to understand what that’s about and why it is an exciting development. For now, please just accept that being able to connect to Second Life and interact live with others there even when you can’t log in normally is a big deal. For instance, I’ll be able to attend meetings from my iPhone and see what is being said in chat even if I don’t have my computer set up or if I’m in an internet café without my laptop.

Besides Second Life, Sparkle will connect to other grids as well, such as OSGrid or Second Life’s beta grid. Right now, those three are the only VWs available, but I’m sure others will be added as demand warrants. It’s possible to set up any number of accounts for various grids, limited only by the number of avatars you have. In fact, you can even sign up for a new account via Sparkle! Select the approprite service, fill in your account username and password, and there you go.

Choose the account you want to login with from the resulting list, click the “Go!” button, and your friends list appears on the next screen, with those online indicated with highlighted stars beside their names, while offline avatars are shown with dimmed stars. To send an IM to one, you select the name, then click the “IM” button on the next screen. A window with the virtual keyboard appears, and you proceed to communicate.

It seems pretty simple, and it is easy to use, but the implications are really awesome. The only real gripe I have about it is the requirement to use WiFi, but there is probably no way around that. Second Life in particular probably needs more bandwidth than the plain old cellular signal can provide. As it is, people who have very long friends lists (like me) have reported long waits to log in. Genkii’s tech support is working on it, and in fact I’ve had better luck logging in with my main account lately, after the first few attempts when it took several long minutes.

Sparkle IM gets a high rating from me. I’ve been waiting for someone to publish an iPhone app for connecting to Second Life, and this is a good one that works. Thanks, Genkii!

Right now we have the router (with the USB modem sticking out the side of it) sitting on the dashboard of our RV:

Connected to the modem is the coax cable from the antenna, which is presently propped up at the middle of the windshield on top of the dashboard. Our friend, Mark, first told us about using a Wilson antenna to boost his cellphone reception and got us thinking about better ways to manage our connectivity. He says he never has used an external mount for his antenna. Sitting it in the windshield or on a table has worked for him even in fringe areas. While internet data at broadband speeds may require it to be placed higher, partiularly in hilly areas, right now having it on the dashboard seems to work for us here, too. The iPhone was having trouble getting a good EDGE network signal, but with the antenna it’s doing just fine on WiFi. Oh, by the way, if I understand it correctly even though the iPhones aren’t connected to the router, just having the antenna and router running and rebroadcasting the signal gives us the benefit of stronger cellphone reception.

To avoid having to lay the antenna down while we’re driving, we will attach it to the windshield center post with velcro loops. We do want to have it available over the road instead of stowing it away. In a few days I’ll be able to report on how well it works in a totally mobile setting as we drive to Amarillo and on toward Tuscon.

If all goes as well as it has been so far, I will be able to restart my history ebooks website, and perhaps change the distribution method from CD-ROMs to online downloads. I have an antique history book, the Standard History of Essex County, Massachusetts, that I’d scanned several years ago and converted to PDF files, then indexed every proper name and loaded them into a database for easy lookup. At one time, when I had the website on a Lasso™-based server, we were able to make the database available online, but I’ll have to learn more about MySQL (or some similar opensource database system) and PHP to do that again.

Having fulltime high-quality internet access is going to open up a lot of possibilities. The only potential problem I can foresee is that we are likely to need more than 5GB of throughput per month if we use this system as much as I expect we might. It’s possible to run over that allowance very easily the way we use the ‘net, with two computers and two iPhones. Every megabyte over 5 gig will cost us US$0.25, which can add up very quickly. Whenever it’s available and not too frustrating, we’ll use the WiFi provided by RV parks, roadside rest areas and internet cafés, and at least until we get an online account with Verizon that will let me keep track of our usage, we will play it safe.

Oh, I didn’t mention the problem I had with Verizon’s website, did I? When I tried to sign up for their online account, it turned out that to enable it I have to enter a code they text to the “cellphone” the account number is connected to. Except that we don’t have a cellphone, we have a wireless modem. Doh! The site says that if they aren’t able to text the code, they’ll mail it to our billing address. Lovely. That means we won’t get it till our mail is forwarded to us in Tucson, at least two weeks from now. Sigh! Maybe if I call Verizon, or the 3GStore.com who sold us the gear, it will be possible to get around that. Verizon ought to have a better arrangement for modem customers since they have been doing this for several years already. It being a weekend as I write this, the call will have to wait until tomorrow, and hope the 3G Store doesn’t observe MLK day.

More details will be forthcoming here as we acquire more experience with this stuff, or watch my Twitter feed (“follow katlemieux”) for minute-by-minute comments as things happen.