Chilled Out Bearded Man

I apologize to all of the professionals who were wounded in the making of this article.

I was listening to a Youtube playlist of classical music in a minimized window. Maximizing that window for a moment to check the name of the artist, I noticed a woman sitting on stage with the pianist. She was sitting so close to him that at first I thought maybe it was his wife or his nurse. Then the video redirected towards the music sitting on his piano and it dawned on me what that woman was doing there. She was (and is and ever will be) a page turner. From then on I watched in complete awe. The anticipation was killing me. Would she turn it? When will she turn it? What if she makes a mistake? Will her mistake cost him the piano championship? I got to the point where the music became background for the page turning.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bn3PdTyj0Q&feature=PlayList&p=2DA91D29ED24F128&playnext_from=PL&playnext=1

After a while I could no longer stand the level of intensity and had to switch back to my other work. When the next song came on I had to check. Would there be another page turner? Amazing! This guy’s piano skills were amazing. Who needs a page turner when you have a piano player? How wrong was I. After a moment the camera zoomed out off of the pianist’s hands and there he was, lo and behold, the page turner. But wait. Something is wrong. Something is missing. There are no pages to turn. The pianist is playing by heart. Then the question comes up, why do you need a page turner if there are no pages? This was completely blowing my mind. What was this guy going to do? He was far younger and was seemingly inexperienced as compared to the previous agile handed mature page turner. Sweat began pouring from my pores. (There was no actual sweat, but it felt like there should have been.) I waited. Was this young man simply the lucky lottery winner who got to sit on stage? Did he perhaps get lost and thought he was in a piano bar? Why wasn’t security pulling him back? So many questions were racing through my head. And then the moment came. I could not have asked for anything more. The “page turner” stood up, took a step forward, and… and… What’s he going to do? THERE ARE NO PAGES TO TURN!! He takes off the pianists glasses. Then he walks away. Huh? It all looked so rehearsed.

Take a look for yourself:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNZerbc-9Kk&feature=PlayList&p=2DA91D29ED24F128&playnext_from=PL&index=31&playnext=2

I have not watched a lot of classical music performances in my life, and I had seen even less solo piano performances. I knew nothing of these page turners. So, of course, wanting to learn more, I searched Google for “the art of page turning”. Can you believe it? The first result is actually exactly what I was looking for.

http://northwestreverb.blogspot.com/2009/07/elizabeth-harcombe-talks-about-art-of.html

By this point, there is no turning back (pun intended). I am in love. This is truly an art, more than even Elizabeth Harcombe could know. This is not just an art. This is a sport. And the musicians are perfect background to build up the suspense. I would really love to see John Cage perform 4’33″ with a page turner by his side. My heart is pounding just thinking about it.

Where else could this go? Well, I’m glad you asked. I searched YouTube for “the best page turner” and to my extreme joy a video of Victor Borge called “Page Turner” turned up (pun intended).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWqFaGwNCMU

I thought there could be nothing better than a stand up comedy routine to end it, but Victor Borge has been one-upped. There is a full-length feature film called… You guessed it. “The Page Turner”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fANWrJPhqWw

Now, I need to get figure out how to unwind before bed.

The keyboard on the T-Mobile Google HTC G2 is pretty cool.

First of all, it is a wide qwerty keyboard. There are only three rows of keys but it feels like everything needed is available. They do this by adding the ALT key and an additional character to each key on the board. Just type ALT once to access the alternate character for a key, or type ALT twice to keep the keyboard in ALT mode.

The @ sign is in a much better position than it was before. It is located at the top left as the main character for that key.

Directly below the @ sign is a “.com” key, which has its alternate character as “www.”. Pretty clever innovation.

The comma and the period are on opposite sides of the space bar.

There are additionally 3 quick keys, which you can set as one click to open email, an application, or a bookmark.

They managed to fit in 2 shift keys and 2 ALT keys which is really helpful.

I think it will take some getting used to the location of the alternate characters which are typically on the numbers keys, since on this keyboard the numbers keys are alternate characters on the top row.

There is only one menu key on the keyboard, but there is an additional one on the edge of the screen.

The search key is also another useful touch, which makes searching on many applications that much faster.

An interesting feature of the keyboard is the light sensor. If it thinks there is not enough light it back lights the keys. At first, I thought there was a loose connection, because the back light kept turning on and off while I was typing. Then I noticed that if I shaded the phone it turned on and if it gets direct light it turns off.

I am more of a hard keyboard kinda guy, but I imagine some people may be into the on screen keyboard SWYPE functionality. SWYPE takes away the need to lift up your fingers when typing letters. It drastically increases your potential typing speed. Instead of pressing the letters of the word individually, you place your finger on the first letter and then drag your finger across the letters of the word. If there is more than one possibility of what you meant, it will offer you options. The first option is the most likely and if it is the correct one, you do not need to even click it – just move on to the next word. Also, there is no need to press the space bar between words. Each word you SWYPE is automatically followed by a space if you SWYPE the next word.

Check out more about SWYPE at swypeinc.com.

I received my G2 last Thursday. I was unfortunately not able to get it set up until play time today. I am excited that I received it so early. When I called in to T-Mobile for some help on setup, the lady I spoke with was shocked that I already have the phone as it has not come out yet.)

I am very quickly falling in love with this phone as I did with the G1 2 years ago. It is a bit silly to compare it to the G1 as the G1 is 2 years old and there have been quite a few solid Android phones released since then.

So instead of comparing, here are a few things, I simply appreciate about the new T-Mobile Google HTC G2.

- The screen is big and very clear.

- There are a lot of preloaded Apps on the phone which I probably would not have otherwise found, such as Google Listen, Google Goggles and Shopper. I expect to use these quite a bit.

- I like the widgets. (On the g1, I was not able to install too many desktop widgets bc they used up too many resources.)

- I love SWYPE. I still prefer the hard qwerty keyboard, but if you are using the onscreen keyboard SWYPE is a very efficient way to type.

- The speed on this thing is amazing.

- I love that I can have multiple gmail accounts.

- Having flash on the phone is just awesome.

- The “www.” and “.com” buttons on the keyboard are a very clever idea (and of course there is still the @ sign as a main key).

- The camera is very nice with the flash.

- Live Wallpapers add a nice look to the screen.

- 7 Home Pages is great.

- Recent Apps window is very nice. (When you long hold the home button.)

- New browser key always on screen is great. (The browser does not reload the page each time like it did on the G1. It even jumped straight into the middle of a flash video I was watching as though I never left.)

Some missing things:

- Still no built in google reader app. This is a very minor issue as NewsRob still does an amazing job.

Things to note:

- The phone came with a new SIM card. I was told by the T-Mobile Customer Care, that I can use the old SIM card. I have read some places on the web that using the new SIM card would improve speed and various other

- I have not yet figured out how to transfer my app data over. I decided to install the apps themselves fresh as the download speed on wifi and HSPA+ is zooming. I have pretty minimal data that I really need to transfer over. Most of my docs are stored on Evernote. The main things I would like to transfer are my OI Shopping lists and the receipts from the Receipt Filer.

- I have never bought an App in the Market, but I have read that if you did buy one on a previous Android phone, you can download it again free of charge as long as you are using the same google account on your new phone.

Tell me more…

As everyone has probably already heard today, Google placed a big eclair on their lawn next to the giant cupcake and donut. Cupcake was the first platform fix of Google’s Android and donut was second recently released update. The big eclair is a sign that the third update must be coming out into the dev world in the near future:

It troubles me a little to say such a thing about men, especially beardless ones, but this video is true beauty. I imagine this must have been the sort of thing that Greek nobility were accustomed to viewing on a regular basis. Unfortunately, I cannot embed the video as Youtube does not allow embedding this first video.

You can view it, by visiting this link
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SPRtIImYJg

And if that wasn’t impressive enough, check out this less exacting, though more animated show:

This would be such an incredible feat if only they had beards. Maybe next time they will grow out some facial hair and make a truly beautiful performance…

This is so wild. Knox and a troop of men carried about 120,000 pounds of cannons 300 miles from Fort Ticonderoga to Boston in 2 months. Because of this amazing feat, the American troops had cannons to surprise attack the British.
The map below isn’t the exact course, but follows the approximate path of Knox and his troops. They carried the cannons over Lake George on boats. Then, they pulled the cannons on sleds over snow and over frozen rivers. There is a lot more to this. Read “1776″ by David McCullough for more details. (I haven’t finished the book, but McCullough is an awesome storyteller.)

Here’s the link in case the route doesn’t show on the map below:
Map

View Larger Map

Is it finally here? Yes it is. Well… Almost… And what is it? Only the greatest thing since smart phones, that’s what. Its gonna turn your smart phone into a true full fledged wireless mobile media device.

Its flash video for smart phones – its the Adobe Flash Player 10.1.

And  just like last November, its almost ready, but not quite. (http://www.chilledoutbeardedman.com/2009/01/25/g1-android-and-adobe-flash-player/) But its definitely sounding a lot more realistic this time around.

It was announced earlier today on October 5, 2009 at Adobe MAX as a part of the Open Screen Project, an initiative to “Enable consumers to engage with rich Internet experiences seamlessly across any device, anywhere.” (www.openscreenproject.org)

A beta version of Adobe Flash Player 10.1 is expected to be available for some devices by the end of 2009. You can sign up to be notified about this release here: https://www.adobe.com/cfusion/entitlement/index.cfm?e=labs_flashplayer10_signup

The Flash Player is expected to be fully available for the first half of 2010, whatever that means.

You can read all of the technical details about the new Flash Player here:

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/features.html

I couldn’t be more excited for this.

I guess 3G service providers will have to start instituting policies for bandwidth usage, as bandwidth is already being strained without mobile devices having easy access to streaming video content.  Apple users have been complaining about bad and slow connections for quite some time now on the AT&T coverage they are required to use.

The big question for me, though, is how’s this all gonna work on T-Mobile’s Android phones?

Not surprisingly, the day before Adobe’s big announcement Google made a little announcement of their own. Google announced that they are joining Adobe on the Open Screen Project. (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/10/teaming-up-with-adobe-and-open-screen.html)

I’ve been wondering for quite some time what the hang up is with getting the Flash Player to run on a wireless mobile device seeing as us Android users have had Youtube accessibility for quite some time now.

It will also be interesting to see how this affect’s the smart phone market as this version of Flash Player is not expected to run on the iPhone.  Adobe is giving developers tools in CS5 for developing iPhone video applications in ActionScript3. CS5 will be available by the end of this year. (http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashcs5/appsfor_iphone/)

Perhaps Apple is planning to come out with some new device that outshines all smart phones including the iPhone and if they can get it onto Verizon’s awesome network maybe they would be in business. But for now, I’m gonna stick with my T-Mobile G1… (Although, the up-and-coming Android based Motorola Cliq sure is sounding tempting. http://www.motorola.com/Consumers/US-EN/Consumer-Product-and-Services/Mobile-Phones/Motorola-CLIQ-US-EN)

Go Adobe! We’ve been ready. We’re ready now. And when you put it out there, we’ll all be there ready with big smiles and glassed over eyes (from watching too many videos, of course).

T-Mobile’s new myTouch Google Android Phone presale will begin on July 8.

http://www.t-mobilemytouch.com/

No hard keyboard, but Android now has a touchscreen keyboard since the Cupcake upgrade. The size looks great.

Apparently the Tmobile G1 Android update I got earlier (http://www.chilledoutbeardedman.com/2009/06/01/g1-firmware-upgrade-to-slick/) is the infamous long awaited Cupcake update.

Some more feature updates that I’ve noticed on my G1 phone:

The camera can now shoot video.

The browser zooming has a button to return to the standard zoom.

The browser zoom box magnifier is better.

An onscreen keyboard with autocomplete that you load by tapping on a text field.
The camera loads up a little faster than before and has two onscreen buttons. In the top left corner is a small thumbnail of the last photo or video you shot. And in the top right corner is a button that you can use for taking photos.

Still missing zoom on the camera (though technically you don’t need it cause you can crop it later and its a high enough quality photo that cropping is feasible).

If you don’t have the updates, yet, those are some of the things you can look forward to getting in the near future.

As far as when your phone will be updated with G1 Cupcake update… I received the phone the day it came out and I received this update at about 8am PST. Two of my friends who have the G1 have not yet received the update. The first friend got the Tmobile G1 in mid-November 2008 and the second purchased it in Febraury 2009.

After I wrote all of that I discovered a full list of the new Android features here:

http://developer.android.com/sdk/android-1.5-highlights.html

The firmware upgrade today on the new G1 seems to have taken the phone from cool to slick. It still does not feel as smooth as the iPhone, but lots of things are better.

The desktop widgets have nicer smooth shiny gray borders.

The screen seems to come out of standby faster than before.

When programs/apps load, they fade in and out more smoothly and quickly.

The buttons on the built-in gmail app are much prettier and not clunky like the old ones.

Also, there are now checkboxes on the gmail list of emails, so that you can apply an action (such as archive) to multiple emails. This is familiar from the traditional gmail.

And there just seems to be nice font, border and background improvements throughout.

One issue that I encountered was that on the first restart after the firmware update, all of the icons on the desktop were missing. This resolved itself when I restarted, again.

What else did people notice?