Tag Archives: pain

Why I won’t be buying an iPad

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By Jeffrey the Barak

I may be the thousandth person to publish a why I will be buying or won’t be buying an iPad rant, but here goes.

I am an Apple enthusiast, with a 27″ iMac, a white Macbook and an iPhone 3G, and I like all of them, despite the Macbook and the iPhone running slower than my needs sometimes demand, but I was determined to play with the iPad before automatically buying one.

The first few times I dropped by an Apple store, the crowds around the iPad table were three deep, but yesterday I had the area all to myself.

The interface and the display on the iPad were so beautiful and sharp, I felt like buying it on the spot, but I decided to stand there and try and perform some tasks over wi-fi first.

There are two things that make this something I should not  buy. Firstly, it may be one of the lightest computers in use today, but since it is handheld, and not sitting on the desk, the meager weight of it eventually becomes a pain, and a warm one at that. This is no great surprise to me because I went through a tablet computing experimental phase in 2005 with an Acer tablet that had an awful display and an even worse operating system (Windows Tablet).

But the clincher for me was the iPad’s version of the Safari browser. It, perhaps deliberately, does not work well with Google. Yes Google, whom I love as much as I love Apple.

In my iGoogle home page, there were white bits representing modules that would not display, and in Google Docs, something my entire business resides in, the spreadsheets were kind of unusable in their “mobile” format. The iPad loads them as if it were a smartphone, and if you’ve ever tried to work in a big spreadsheet on a phone, you will understand torture.

So I will pass on the iPad, and probably also pass on any Google Android tablet that appears, for the same reason, but I will eagerly await the chance to get a Google Chromium netbook. I think that Chromium will be the key, and phone-based stripped-down operating systems like the iPad OS and the Android OS will only be useful for entertainment, as in photo viewing, book reading, video watching etc.

But to be fair, that is what the iPad is intended for, No-one said it should be used for real work first and fun second.

So a Google Netbook with a real keyboard is an exciting prospect to cut down on the weight of hauling a Macbook around, and I’ll gladly pay extra for a beautiful screen resolution to rival the iPad’s beauty of a display.

Such a thing should hit the streets later in 2010.

Jeffrey the Barak is an AppleGoogleTrout

UPDATE November 17th 2010

Well, I bought one, on September 30th and gave it six week of my time. Now it’s for sale on eBay because I cannot work on it. All I really do is work in email for eight hours a day, in Gmail to be specific, but Gmail on iOS is not so elegant as in OSX. Worst of all, my essential huge database, is a Google Spreadsheet, and even with the November Mobile Gdocs update, it’s a pig in iOS.So it will be a Macbook Air for me, unless the fabled Chrome Speedbook suddenly arrives and passes the rest. But I am not trying to be too negative about  the iPad, it’s a superb device and worth it’s price. My personal needs cannot be served by the iOS, but I’m not the average guy.

Is Ballet Humane?

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By Leda Meredith

Today one of the young student dancers I rehearsal direct in a Nutcracker production came up to me and pointed to her right foot. A bad blister had bled through her tights and through her pointe shoe. She looked up at me with wide eyes and a well-trained ballet-school smile and asked if it was okay if she did the run-thru on flat. I said yes, the other ballet mistress said no. She kept the shoes on. During the run through, I heard, “Smile, girls, it’s Nutcracker not a tragedy!” shouted at the dancers. I looked at Susan’s foot. Her shoe was red with blood. She was smiling.

This is complicated. There are times when I think a dancer does need to perform despite bleeding blisters and such. When the curtain is going up and there is no understudy, for example. On the other hand, if this were foreign policy rather than ballet I’d say it was utterly inhumane.

I think ballet is beautiful. The ancient Chinese bound women’s feet because they thought small feet were beautiful. What did those women think? My ballet students are willing to put up with real physical and psychological pain in pursuit of beauty. Is it worth it? Is there an alternative way to get to the beauty without the torture? Are we willing to break with tradition to investigate what that way might be?

In a recent dinner conversation with Cynthia Gregory, she mentioned that during her performing career she was very protective of her body. For example, she would let whoever was running the rehearsal know that she could only do one full-out one through. This was not laziness, but a guarded attention to what her instrument could handle. She had no major injuries during her remarkable career.

Sometimes dancers abuse this principle. “I have to mark this run thru because the floor is slippery” (when it isn’t), “I can’t do the lifts today because my back is bad” (when it isn’t). Directors are sometimes right to be skeptical of dancers claiming physical excuses not to perform full out.

But then there is Susan with her bleeding feet at a rehearsal when it won’t make or break the show if she does the run thru on pointe or not. Given enough longevity, professional dancers learn how to make this call for themselves: yes, I can do this and it won’t injure me and it’s necessary vs. no, this would actually injure me and/or isn’t really necessary. But what are we teaching our dance students?

“Smile, girls, smile!” Right. Maybe that needs some rethinking.

Leda Meredith is the author of “Botany, Ballet, & Dinner from Scratch” (Heliotrope Books 2008). She is the winner of the 2007-2008 Teaching Excellence Award from Adelphi University. For more, go to www.ledameredith.com

Photo: Leda Meredith and Jonathan Riseling in Francis Patrelle’s “Macbeth”, Photo Credit: Eduardo Patino