So when Google and Verizon announced their little deal and I started reading some of the reactions to it, I started worrying a little bit. The deal suggests completely open “public Internets” but doesn’t say what it means by public, in terms of whether or not there’s some sort of… private Internet going on. The other point that has me worried is the fact that they’re recommending against this kind of openness for wireless broadband, which sucks because I suspect Verizon makes more money from wireless Internet connections these days than it does from wired broadband (especially given all of those DSL properties it recently sold to Frontier) along with the fact that mobile broadband is gaining speed, not only in terms of actual data transfer capabilities and in the markets that it serves, but in terms of the adoption rate and the rate at which it becomes a viable means for somebody to stay in touch with the world of the Internet.

We’ll see what happens. I’m not afraid that suddenly the Internet as we know it is going to crater in on itself tomorrow — but I am interested in my continued and unfettered access to do what I need, where I need to do it and when I need it.

The good news, though, is that the WordPress app for the iPad is really sweet.

The Tumblr site is also useful for a lot of different things. One things being posted right now is the photos from my vacation with Megan to visit art schools in California. There were maybe 70 photos in that group, and one of the things I love about Tumblr, as compared to Flickr or Twitter or my regular blog here on stenoweb.net, which all tend to be well-suited to specific types of content, but not others. As an example, I can post photos to Flickr (although only a certain number of them at any given time) and they are presented in a very logical way. Similarly, I can post 140-character instant status updates to twitter, and those work out pretty well. And finally, I can put long-form things, essays and such, on my traditional blog web site, which also has good facilities for the management of static content on a collection of regular pages. And finally, I do have a site built out of static HTML pages, but there are just a bunch of disadvantages to that.

So, what’s the point of all of that? Well, the odd thing is that even though each of these many avenues for posting information is very effective for its area of specialty, none of them is necessarily a shining bastion of absolute perfection, Flickr I don’t even use as often as twitter and my blog, and both of those tend to get cross-updates with my Tumblr account as it is anyway. Although I haven’t yet considered exactly how or why, I have indeed considered that I may at some point want to move my main blogging experience to a site like Tumblr.

For now, however, most of my big project-style postings go onto the blog and smaller things get dumped to the end of the Tumblr queue, but we’ll see what happens as I move into the future and start defining what I really want to do with my blog. (Which you’d think after so many years I’d know, but ah well.)

But, that was back when Google thought their business model for selling a phone exclusively unlocked and exclusively on the Internet was going to be successful. I’ll admit, I very seriously thought about getting one, but the question is “Why should I?” when I can run on down to my local carrier store and get a phone nearly as great (or better, for me, what with the TouchPro2 having a keyboard) for $150 on a contract, which works out since I intend to keep having phone service for awhile. (Although to be fair about the store thing, I knew I wanted the TouchPro2 after having used AT&T’s variant in their store, then I went over to the Verizon store where they weren’t carrying it, and had them order it up and deliver it to me.)

Of course, there are a lot of benefits to the idea of buying your phone unlocked, or at least off-contract, but those benefits are the most noticeable when you’re buying a device to use not as a phone but as a PDA, or if you’re in Europe and you’re going to be switching SIM chips between carriers in different countries. The benefits to buying off-contract involve being able to terminate that contract at will, and of course, being able to get a new device whenever it strikes your fancy. (Although that bit involves having the money for it too.)

I do wonder how long the Nexus One will be available in its current form, and whether or not there are any price reductions pending. As a media device, along with as a device to have just to fiddle with Android, the Nexus One doesn’t look completely terrible, and of course it has the advantages for me of being a) A google-experience device will receive updates far faster. (Because only Google controls the update process on it. Frequently, both the vendor of a mobile OS and the carrier the device is on will need to have their hands in software updates for devices, which slows down the process significantly, especially when you add in manufacturer enhancements such as HTC Sense or Samsung TouchWiz) B) The device is available for a set price, unlocked, willing to run wifi-only.

There are a few other Google Experience devices left. The HTC G1, which was the first shipping Android device is still available, and the Motorola Droid is also considered to be a Google Experience device, however those still have everybody’s hands on them when it’s software update time, meaning that Verizon Wireless has the capability (and frequently exercises this capability) to delay or put influence into a software update that Google and Motorola are working on. It’s annoying, and the Nexus One has been a great thing for people wanting the true, raw, most up-to-date Android experience.

I personally predict that there will be another Google-branded device at some point in time, because eventually the 1GHz Snapdragon will be considered old and slow even for phones and media playback devices. (Although when that’ll be is anyone’s guess: HTC continues to ship devices based on Ye Olde 528MHz Qualcomm 7200-series chips.)

What will be different about the next Google Phone is that it will probably be HTC or Motorola or Samsung branded, piece of hardware, with an agreement between Google, the manufacturer and the carriers that Google and only Google actually has its hand on maintaining the software for the device. And then the manufacturer and carriers will be responsible for marketing and distributing the device. But we’ll see.

It has been awhile since I’ve felt this particular feeling and it (along with a few other things I drafted but never posted) has been quite jarring and has given me a sort of mini-wakeup of the fact that I do have myasthenia gravis, and that I’m either pumped pretty incredibly full of various medications, or I simply run out of puff at some point through the day.

This particular concept is difficult to explain to some people. I can wake up totally capable of hopping around and jumping into the shower and walking a few miles and speaking properly, even when I’m not on very much medication, but if I am not careful with what I do, I can pretty quickly become fatigued. Even with my medications as they currently stand, things like moving have been far more difficult, and I paid for several days after getting everything to my apartment, even with the help of all of my fantastic friends.

A fantastic read, about what this kind of thing feels like comes from “The Spoon Theory.” This woman and her best friend of several years were talking one day and the friend asks “What is it like, having Lupus?” The author was surprised and immediately started describing a bunch of the surface symptoms of lupus, general physical sickness, which is terrible. The friend pushed on and wanted to know more. What daily life is actually like with the disease, “what it felt like, not physically, but what it felt like to be me, to be sick.”

The result is that the author describes what she calls the spoon theory. Basically, in a chronic illness that involves fatiguing, you start your day with a certain number of “spoons.” These spoons, or any other counter, really, are a measure of what you can and can’t do on any given day. It’s extremely true. When I first got the disease, it was often the case that I could do normal things in the morning, either for a certain amount of time or just a certain level of activity, and then after a certain point, just be completely useless.

Although it has been better in the past several months, it’s still important for me to be aware of, especially as the levels for my medications get adjusted, or I need to do different things throughout the day. I have been trying to change my medication levels, so I can rely less on pyridostigmine throughout my day, and ultimately, I’d even love to be done with prednisone. So a few days ago I started to realize that my need for pyridostigmine has indeed reduced a little bit, but I took it to this extreme level that not only caused my grocery incident tonight, but also an incident a few days ago where I hadn’t equipped myself with enough time to get everywhere I needed to be, and therefore tried to rush over the cardiac hill on campus. Needless to say, it lived up to its name and about halfway up I definitely started to feel like I wouldn’t make it. Fortunately I did, but I had a few bad moments that day.

I have also been wanting to lay out what I think about comparing my disease to other diseases. I implied a comparison between myasthenia gravis and lupus earlier, but the truth is, based on what I’ve read Christine Miserandino, there just isn’t any comparison, Lupus is far worse.

Which brings me to something that happened with Glenn recently: he compared MG to another chronic disease, Crohn’s Disease. Crohn’s, my understanding has it, is a terrible terrible thing where your internal organs are all messed up. On the other hand, my understanding is that the the symproms of Crohn’s, from WebMD, happen to be the same as the symptoms I experience from just one of my medications: Headaches, feeling faint, stomach aches and sometimes, diarrhea and vomiting.

Although I want to think Glenn knows a lot about my condition, having lived with me and been kept up to date on it since it was diagnosed, I think I may be sorely wrong about his awareness of it. It starts in that he wouldn’t listen to my explaination of how MG is categorized between autoimmune disorders and neuromuscular diseases, and what those categorizations mean. It’s not like I haven’t been on Google quite frequently since late 2008, learning all of this stuff. At that point, his telling me that my disease was similar to this other disease was just adding to my frustration.

To put it simply… yes, I have miracle medication, but no, that doesn’t mean I’m without the disease or I don’t sometimes have to be conscious of it, and the comparison Glenn was making was that this other kid’s disease was as bad as mine.¹ That’s simply untrue no matter how you slice it. His disease has visible symptoms as bad as simply one of my medications. If I weren’t on that medication, I could be falling over in crosswalks, choking and improperly swallowing bits of Taco Bell lettuce, and generally having a hard time at living life.

And so, I have the article that I now need to show to Glenn. A few of my friends have already become aware of it and from time to time even ask me about my spoons, a gesture which I appreciate more than I care to share. We’ll see how relevant it remains or becomes as the adjustments to my medications begin to take effect.

Footnotes!

1: That’s not to suggest that I’m unsympathetic to people with diseases other than MG. This is simply to suggest that when you’re perfectly healthy and you have a friend with a chronic disease, it is a bad idea to tell them “this other disease is worse” especially when that is factually false, and continue to insist that you’re correct.

So, I went ahead and grabbed a few of the albums I’d most recently purchased from the iTunes Music Store and popped them onto my MicroSD chip. Lo and behold, they started playing immediately.

This includes both AAC files I have ripped from CDs I own, along with M4A files that I have purchased from the iTunes Store.

This has been one of the biggest points of contention between my phone and I, for a very long time. It has also been the biggest reason that I keep experimenting with alternative ways to play music, and between my Walkman, my old iPod, the old iPhone, and various means of streaming on the current phone, there are indeed plenty.

But sometimes, it’s nice to know that I can buy an album on iTunes, and dump it on my phone and listen to it while I’m walking around.

Right now, the phone has a 2GB memory card in it, and that’s definitely enough for average phone usage, I’m going to consider very carefully getting an 8, or maybe even a fantastic 16 or 32 gigabyte memory chip for the thing, so as to be able to fit more music on it.

It’s my understanding, by the way, that there are a huge number of cooked roms available for most Windows Mobile handsets, which is both nice and terrifying. I was interested in getting one that has some of the features of their newer and more recently updated handsets from HTC, such as the Peep twitter client, and maybe even some of the other nice things from the HD2 such as the Barnes & Noble and Blockbuster clients being built in. The terrifying part about this is that there are dozens, if not hundreds of ROMs for the various releases of the TouchPro2. (Seriously, there’s the unlocked European TP2, the AT&T Tilt2, the T-Mobile TP2, and the Verizon/Sprint CDMA TP2s, all of which have their little differences.)

It was much to my pleasure when I learned then, that Verizon Wireless has actually released a recent update to the TouchPro2. All of the information about it on the Internet has been pretty vague as to what actually happens when you install the update. So, I made the decision to keep cleaning up and archiving things into the Microsoft My Phone service (which is fantastic, by the way) and then last night I finally did the upgrade.

There are a lot of fantastic differences in the new version. For example, the home screen now shows a launcher for three icons, expandable to a grid of 9. These icons can be applications on the device, web site bookmarks, or contacts. The contacts thing is pretty cool, and you can get it to bring up a specific communication method or you can get it to show you their contact card. The People tab has also been updated, showing a grid with up to fifteen spots for various people that, just like on the home tab, you can either select between contact cards or specific communication methods. This is great if I know, for example, that I will never contact my coworker Roger any way other than by sending an e-mail to his school or work email address. I wouldn’t have to bother with the extra click involved. Additionally, the Mail tab in the new version of Sense displays messages in a larger format, and is more responsive to flipping through a pile of messages. The music tab also got a bit of an upgrade, and there are also options all over the place to start up a distinct “Camcorder” app which may have been there before, but it is nice to reduce the amount of clicks and swipes you might have to make in an effort to record video. Other little improvements, or just things that I’m noticing for the first time, include animated backgrounds, a way to preview the weather animations, along with an improved (more consistent) locking screen and action.

After the addition of home screen launcher icons, my favorite part of the new ROM, hands down, would have to be HTC Peep Twitter client. There are quite a few Twitter clients on Windows Mobile, and the simple truth is that most of them are pretty terrible. I was getting by before with PockeTwit, mainly because it was free, and it did a basic set of tasks fairly well. With Peep, it’s right there in the Sense UI, which along with the other enhancements in Sense, are making me very much wanting to continue using it full-time, as compared with my previous habit of switching interfaces on a very regular basis, between Sense, WinMo 6.5 “Titanium” and the classic WinMo 6 home screen.

Other than that, the updated ROM had a few teething troubles as it was installed and then as I tried to do a few things with it for the first time, and there are a few features it has (such as animated backgrounds) that I think will ultimately cause more problems and slowdowns than it’s worth, so I have opted not to use any of those (Even though they are very pretty, and impressive.) However, once those particular issues were sorted out, it seems to be that the new ROM is an improvement in a lot of ways. For example, streaming media, especially with the Slacker Personal Radio application seems to work far better than it had in the past. With the old ROM, it was a pretty frequent occurrence that a station in Slacker would play two songs, come across an ad, and then just stop, until I either switched stations (so I could hear another two songs) or restarted the application. Hopefully it stays working that way.

And, the last difference is mainly that I haven’t put all of my stuff back in. Right now I just have my primary gmail account hooked to it, so I can get alerts/calendars/contacts and my work e-mail (it’s the school account) and I haven’t yet bothered to hook up any of my other email accounts. Whether or not I will is really up in the air, as there isn’t a legitimate reason why I’d need access to all of them on-the-go. They’re nice, but I’m at my computer all of the time anyway. One other thing I’ve noticed is that there must be a new build of Opera included, as now my mobile banking web site displays properly and readably from the get-go.

So far, I have no new plans for ROM flashing, as this new updated one has solved any of the complaints I was having before. Indeed, lame as it sounds to say this, does somewhat make me that much more happy with the TouchPro2 for that much longer. (Not that I’ve ever been unhappy with it, just that I’ve been a bit fidgety and interested in trying out some different mobile platforms.)

Firstly, calendaring and scheduling is increasingly important among people of my generation. I put just about every thing I do in my calendar, even if it’s not something I’m going to show anybody else, it just helps me keep track of where I was and where I am going to be. I’ve either reached an era, or an age, in my life where most of the people I know are doing calendaring of some sort, even if it just involves having Google Calendar send reminder-texts.

The second funny thing about Lady Gaga’s declarations is that she (in the universe of the song, at least) has some friends who (to use the wording of Ke$ha) are blowing up her phone-phone. Maybe there’s something different about phone etiquette these days, but I was always told that if somebody doesn’t answer their phone, what you do is maaaaaybe try again in a half-hour if it’s so important, but generally you call, get an answering machine (or voicemail box, these days) and then leave a message. I think part of it is that a lot of people my age (Lady Gaga is only 23 months older than I am) tire both of leaving and listening to voicemails. I know a lot of people within four years of my own age (both older and younger) who instead of leaving a voicemail, will hang up when they realize they’ve gotten that far, and then try calling back again in a few minutes. Not only is this annoying, but it has the capability to be a little bit creepy too, and I’m left uninformed about what’s going on that would prompt the call in the first place.

Which brings me to my next mild annoyance about voicemails: A surprising number of people do not listen to voicemails they get before calling somebody back about something. Frequently enough, I didn’t actually want to have a long phone conversation with somebody when I called them, so leaving a voicemail was a perfect opportunity for me to convey my information to them, and then be done with it. Instead, they call me back a few moments later, just to tell me that they didn’t listen to my message, wanting to know what was up.

There are some people for whom I either don’t leave messages anymore, or for whom I tend not to need to, just because these people are very avid about their call history logs. And sometimes, I’ve learned it just works better to send a text message, which is an option that I do exercise more now than I did on my previous phone, just due to the number of texts I’m allotted in a month having increased, and due to my not being completely aware of everybody’s schedules.

This brings up another issue. Lady Gaga mentions in another line in the song that her having brought the phone was indeed a disastrous idea, and that she should have left it at home. Should she have? Probably — if you’re going out to party and you’re going with some friends, I don’t see any real reason to bring it, at least not if you’re in the kind of social group that I imagine that Lady Gaga occupies, and especially if she was going with a few friends in case anything had happened. I personally always bring my phone with me places, and am definitely always checking on it, but I would be quite unlikely to take a call in a club or at a party, and admittedly would be quite unhappy if somebody kept persisting in calling me in that situation enough times that I eventually did have to answer the phone, in order to tell them to stop calling.

I am sure there’s more to the issue, but those are just a few of the things that ran through my mind as the song played this morning on my iPod.

However, I now write (initially on my phone) to indicate that when considering the use of such services, mobile-os devices seem to be the one place where [currently] the data will not really be available in any useful way. The sad thing about this is that it’s not very easy to transition files between the mobile ecosystem (say, I start a composition on my phone while Megan and I are driving to Tucson, or I’ve got my WorkPad Z50 during a class) and I then want to start working on that file on a bunch of network-connected PCs. It’s relatively easy to transition the file, given that I can access a flash drive from where I’m sitting (so it won’t work very well if at all if I’m at a Sun Ray thin client.) However, the question becomes “what happens when I’m not at a network-connected desktop computer?”

The reason this is a problem is because the ease of transition for files tends to be one-way. It’s very easy to put a document into the Windows Live Office Web App ecosystem when I’ve got access to both the mobile device and a desktop computer, and it’s technically possible under the same conditions to go the other way. However it is either outrightly impossible or very difficult to edit documents within most online-office ecosystems on a new mobile or tablet device, and the WorkPad Z50 straight-up does not have network connectivity, for all intents and purposes.

It looks to be unofficially possible to force the iPad’s web browser to open the edit view on the Office Web Apps, however I don’t have the capability to test this so I do not know how well it’ll work, what it’ll look like and what the performance is like, especially given that while it does work in Safari and OmniWeb on the Mac, it is definitely not the fastest it could be in those environments.

Unfortunately, even if it works fantastically on the iPad, it doesn’t help me when the devices I have happen to be the old iPhone and a Windows Mobile phone. I do consider the “Office Live + Windows Mobile” situation to be particularly bad, just given that Windows Mobile should ostensibly be a first-class citizen on the Office Live ecosystem. Indeed, I even think that they should be offering a special app to access these services from Windows Mobile, or offering a way to tie Office Live into my Office Mobile experience, but that’s apparently something that’s coming with Windows Phone 7 and its version of Office Mobile. (Although, there’s an entire discussion there about whether or not I want to wait until the end of this year to have on a Microsoft-branded device what I had with my iPhone when it was new in early 2008.)

I would say something about this being why I am going to upgrade to an Android phone at some point, but honestly, the note-taking and mobile document processing situation on Android is actively worse than on the iPhone. Evernote exists, but that has been losing things and having issues actually staying in sync when I use the desktop client, and of course there’s the fact that Evernote’s desktop client is straight-up terrible.

We’ll see what happens. Part of why this is such a big issue is that I’m still working on the complete solution for the replacement of my paper Steno notebook, which I still carry around for certain situations anyway, as it is just the best way to write and present certain kinds of information. This is therefore a very personal problem, and one I currently have a lot of time to work on solving, and until then I can use (time intensive) manual work-arounds, like Evernote on my mobile paired with “copy and paste” magic on my desktop computer. I have honestly even thought of starting up another physical steno pad as my daily log, or making the decision that my daily log needs to exist only in one device or ecosystem (even if that device remains in the physical realm).

My complaint/point stands overall however, that there is some work to do in the ecosystem of web applications for compatibility with the types of devices that are essentially the future of computing. My thought is that at the moment, it shouldn’t even be too terribly difficult because there are two major players in this scene: iOS (iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch) and Android (and all of the devices therein on 1.6, 2.0, 2.1 and eventually 2.2, most of which just use the standard Android web browser, to my understanding. I suggested in my previous article on the topic that a potential solution is for Microsoft to actually offer an iPad application, with a complete full-screen interface tailored for the device, but that still only addresses part of the overall issue that exists.

Additionally, it’s still just weird that Google Docs doesn’t have mobile editing enabled, given that Docs is a far more “mature” product than Office Live, and that it is probably in Google’s best interest to get it running on Android before Apple or Microsoft extends iWork.com or Office Live to the Android web browser.