Mark Whitcher

I am not a tech journalist. So the three people who actually might be reading this far probably won’t even care what I have to say, but I have been watching Apple keynotes for a long time and I want to say a few things about the iPad that his Steveness introduced yesterday.

Living up to the hype…

Whenever there is keynote-type event where Steve Jobs gets up and announces a new product, there is a huge amount of hype in the weeks and months leading up to it. Everyone in tech journalism writes about what they think is going to be announced and all the great things that the new device is going to do. There is always a boat-load of speculation about what the device will be, what it will look like, and how humans will interact with it.

Without fail, after the keynote, there is a collective groan/sign. It is never what people are expecting or hoping for; it doesn’t have all the expected features. You will invariably see a feature comparison list that will show that the new device from Apple doesn’t have anything more than what may already be on the market, or coming to the market soon.

So everyone, including Apple fan boys, comes away a little disappointed. It might be super cool, and they might still want one, badly, but it isn’t all emotional bliss. They’re not as excited about the product as they were expecting to be.

...over time

The thing about Apple is that they have a knack and a passion for getting the fundamentals right. They make products that go beyond being a list of features, to having what my freshman design instructor called the “it factor.” It is the idea that the product becomes more than the sum of all its parts. That when you look at a work of art (or in this case a product) you don’t think about what it took to make it, or any of the pieces that make the whole. Everything just works and you engage with it whole-heartedly.

Apple products may not always wow us right out of the starting gate, but they are fundamentally something different. Over time they change how we do what we do and become a part of our lives. A year or two from now, if the iPad is a success, we won’t be thinking about all the things the tech journalists are thinking about right now. We’ll just be using it and living it.

But will it be another cube?

In 2000 Apple introduced the G4 Cube which was kind of a cool design for a computer. All the nerds were talking about it, but it never took off and was killed in 2001. The main problem with it was probably the cost, as it was more expensive than similar models that Apple sold.

Any product can end up dead if it doesn’t sell, and the money-carrying public can go in unexpected directions.

So will the iPad end up in the same place? Only time can to say for sure.

The iPhone was the watershed moment

The interaction paradigm that was established by the iPhone three years ago was the big change in the fundamental way we interact with computing devices. Before the iPhone we interacted with the data that computers display using secondary devices (keyboards, mice, styli). After the iPhone, we all understand that it is more natural to interact with it directly using our fingers. It feels right. We don’t use a mechanism to turn the page of a book; we just pick up the book and use it. The iPhone established this as a way to use a computer, and the computer industry will never be the same.

The iPad is the beginning of taking this paradigm into mainstream computing. What could be more natural than taking a thin device like the iPad and holding it in your hands and viewing the web, viewing video, or writing email? It takes the new way that the world consumes information (and by that I mean the web and all that entails from newspapers to video entertainment) and moves it to a much more comfortable, old-school way of consuming information in the palm of your hand. You no longer have to go to the household computer desk or grab the big laptop out of the laptop bag to do all this stuff. It has all the convenience of grabbing a book.

You also are no longer confined to the small screen of the iPhone. For all its greatness, the iPhone is a pocket device that is meant to go with you anywhere. You can sit and watch a movie on it if you have to, but I would much rather see it on a larger screen. We are willing to trade off the size of the screen for the fact that it is always in our pocket and available.

It’s finally here

Ever since Apple introduced handwriting recognition into OSX, I have been waiting for a tablet. Getting rid of everything and leaving only the data that the device displays has always seemed to me like the direction computing should go.

Now that the iPad is here, it certainly isn’t what I always dreamed of. It’s probably more than that.

Several month back I decided to jailbreak my iphone in order to enable tethering on the phone. I had been using another solution previously but I really wanted to bring my phone up to the newest iPhone OS 3.1.2 and that solution didn’t work with the update.

Jailbreaking my phone was easy to do using blackra1n and I have had no bad effects from it at all.

Now, before you get all judgmental on me, I am not doing this to try to avoid paying any charge that AT&T might add for tethering. AT&T doesn’t offer tethering on the iphone for some reason, and I really need it. Whenever AT&T does start offering it I will gladly pay the extra and use the official tethering method.

Two other huge benefits of the jailbreak are GV Mobile and Siphon. GV mobile lets me easily make calls with my Google Voice number which is what I use for my business phone. Siphon is a SIP voip phone that lets me connect to my Gizmo5 account for making free calls. Google Voice and Gizmo5 give me an easy way to make cheap calls for my business so I don’t use up all my cell phone minutes.

The reason I am writing this now is that I just got off the phone with one of my clients using Siphon and Google Voice. The call quality is excellent and it makes me smile to know I didn’t have to pay anything for the call.

I’ve been using Parallels on my macbook pro for about two years. For the most part I have been pretty happy with it. It works reasonable well, however, I was thinking about upgrading to the newest version to get some of the speed improvements that it mentions in the list of features.

The problem is that I am two versions behind in the upgrade chain and to upgrade now I have to pay full price. It is only $50, but that is still a good amount of money when are newly self-employed (2.5 years) and you don’t use credit cards.

Two days ago I found Virtualbox which is a free product built by Sun Microsystems. I’ve been using it for two days now and I am completely satisfied. The speed is much better than the versions of Parallels that I was using, and it made it easy for me to duplicate my virtual machine once I had Windows XP installed. I used this to set up different machines for the different versions of Internet Explorer. I had been using one of the multiple ie solutions out there. However that fell apart recently when I used conditional comments to target different versions of IE. The multiple versions of IE render properly, but they don’t parse conditional comments properly.

Anyway, virtualbox is a great solution for running virtual machines on a mac. Just throwing it out there for anyone interested.

Last night at church, my son, Logan, gave a prayer request that made me chuckle and smile. It reminded me of some of the requests he used to give before bed time each night when he was about four, and my father had a copy of them that he sent back to me. These make me chuckle even more.

• that Boomer [our boxer] won’t wag his tail when we are looking angry at him
• that all the men in boats will keep from tipping over
• that all the light bulbs will never burn out
• that Emmie’s [his sister’s] lamp will work again
• that all the rhinoserouses will keep out of America (I think he was terrified of rhinoserouses at the time).

It turns out, this is the month that both of my grandfathers have left this earth to join their Savior, Jesus Christ, in heaven.

My mother’s dad, Don Harper, passed away last night.

I have been thinking about this post ever since I wrote the last one and there are two stories I would like to share with you that really kind of summarize Grandpa.

Several years back, my family on my Mom’s side had Christmas all together at my aunt’s house in Michigan. Growing up, Grandma and Grandpa’s house is where we would always spend Christmas, so it was kind of neat to have the grandkids and the growing number of great grandkids there for Christmas together again. When we were all gathered together getting ready to open gifts, Grandpa made us wait and told us the story of how he and Grandma had come to know God as the result of someone coming and knocking on their door and inviting them to church. He challenged all of us to know the importance of going and “knocking on doors”. Because someone had the courage to go and knock on their door, this clan of people (there were almost 20 of us at the time) were all together, saved, and most were serving the Lord in some sort of ministry.

I will never forget that night. The Lord has used that memory many times to remind me of what I should be doing.

The second story is simple, and is from when my wife and I were newly engaged. We were at my Grandpa’s house visiting him one summer. We were getting ready to leave and doing our hugs and “love you”’s on our way out the door, when he looked at Ingrid and said, “I love you.” He paused for a bit and said, “I mean that. You are my family and I love you.” Grandpa loved his family hugely. As his grandkids got married and his family grew, he loved us all and showed that love all the time. Much of the time that love made him worry more than any of us thought was good, but it was all about his love for his family. The way he welcomed my wife into his family, and made sure she knew it, made me love him even more.

The last thing I’ll say, and no mention of Grandpa’s life would be complete without it, is how much he loved and missed his own wife, Mary. She died more than twenty years ago and Grandpa had been missing her deeply ever since. I am not sure how many years it took before Grandpa was at peace with “Mama” not being with him, but even when he accepted it, he still missed her deeply. Well, he and Grandma are now both sitting at the feet of their Savior. Grandpa’s been looking forward to this day for a very, very long time.

As I said not too long ago, life is short and I will see Grandpa again soon in heaven. I smile knowing he’s probably not missing us as much as we are and will miss having him here with us.

I’ve got to say something and put it down in writing. My grandfather, Page Whitcher, died during the night last Friday night. He was a Christian and I will see him again one day when we are together in heaven. He died at the age of eighty-eight, being, as the Bible puts it, old and full of days. Death is the way of all life, and Grandpa lived a good, full life.

There is no way I could sum up his life for you to read. There is not much about him that I know except the memories that I have of which he was a part. I didn’t see him very much when I was growing up because of the distance between us, maybe every two or three years.

Many of my memories of Grandpa involve him building something. One summer — I must have been around ten years old — my dad helped him with some work he had to do building his a-frame cabin in the mountains north of Phoenix. I can see an image in my mind of Grandpa and Dad raising up the giant upside-down v that was to be one of the rafters for the roof. It was a beautiful cabin. I would love to someday go to the owner and buy the place back into the family.

Another summer, when I was fifteen, I spent some time with him helping out with another building project he had building an apartment for him and Grandma to live in behind the insurance business that Grandma was involved with. I got to drive him around in his brand new Chevy pickup truck that had a fuel injected 350 engine. I loved driving that truck. I remember he was surprised that I was using my right foot for both the gas and the break pedals (I guess he thought I was used to driving a standard transmission, but I never had). I did some painting for him and generally was a second pair of hands when he needed it. We really enjoyed the time together.

I remember him reading Louis Lamour and telling me how he didn’t have to buy new books anymore. He was getting old enough that he couldn’t remember a book by the time he got back to it in his collection so it was just as good as reading a new one. He sat in the camper he and Grandma were living in (while the apartment got built) eating his daily breakfast of toast and coffee while reading Louis Lamour.

The only time I remember seeing him after that (though there were probably other times I just can’t remember) are at weddings. He came to mine, and then I saw him again at my sister’s and then again at my brother’s. I haven’t seen him since then (that was ten years ago).

It’s hard to imagine all the ways that Grandpa had a profound impact on me, and I probably don’t even realize it. He was a Christian, which lead to my father becoming one, which lead to me becoming one. Now I try to live every day building a personal relationship with the God who created the universe, and Grandpa played a part in that. He also gave my father a love of the mechanical, which rubbed off on me. I am not nearly as adept at it, but I am sure it had something to do with my love of computers and programming (it’s all about figuring out how things work) which is now my source of income as I work from home and take care of my kids.

Of course, I am sorry to see him go, but as Paul said, I don’t sorrow as those with no hope. Life goes by so quickly; it won’t be too long before I see him again.

See you later, Grandpa.

UPDATE—I found this postcard that grandpa gave to me back in 1993. It seems like I remember meeting him at an airshow, but I can remember where. I want to say Wisconsin, but I can remember why we would have been there.

I came in to work this morning (which happens to be a workstation at a FedEx Kinkos, at least for a couple hours or so until I move on to a cafe) and there was only one other person at one of the workstations.

I had seen this person before, but I am still not quite sure where. I think he was on the side of the road. His dress, his hair, and the bag of belongings he was carrying make it pretty obvious that he is a transient/homeless individual.

I am guessing that he was in here checking an email account or something like that. You never know what the background of people in this situation is. It is entirely possible that he had a full-blown tech job at one point and only has one gmail account left from those days. Maybe that is how he keeps in touch with a grown child that lives far away. Maybe he is job hunting.

Whatever his situation is or was, it is good to remember that our situation, whatever it may be, is a gift from God. We really don’t have much control. We could just as easily end up in a situation similar to the guy I saw this morning in FedEx Kinkos.

Also, as the title of this post suggests, when you are in a position to do something to help someone in that situation, make sure that you do. I don’t mean throw money at the person on the corner who is asking for it (not necessarily). In all likelihood, doing so is only providing the means to go to the convenience store and buy alcohol later in the day. That does that person absolutely no good. There are more ways than financial to invest in someone else’s life, and the financial isn’t even the most important way.