When FOX allowed Joss Whedon an intellectual property blank check so that he could create Firefly, his vision was profoundly unique and decidedly un-Star Trek. The Alliance, Whedon’s Starfleet equivalent, is portrayed as unwanted big government, both bumbling and oppressive. Gene Roddenberry’s starship crews were harmonious visions of a utopian future while the crew of the Serenity must struggle to get along and to survive. No replicators there. Perhaps that’s why Firefly (and also Star Trek’s own DS9) is part of my beloved television show pantheon. It took something I understood very well, and showed me a different way to look at it, and, rather than railing against my established conventions, I embraced the new layers that allowed me to love more deeply.

Now what does that have to do with The Naked Now, a terrible episode of television that I bid you not to watch?

Watching The Naked Now made me think about television fan miracles. I would say that Firefly is the first and finest of the modern TV and Internet era. Fans united online and purchased full-page newspaper ads. They demanded a DVD set and when it was made available it was purchased in droves. The movement caught the eye of Universal Studios, who then optioned and produced the 2005 movie continuation of the series, Serenity.

The more I think about it the more I think it’s an incredible story. The cancellation of Firefly was so tragic and sad while its resurrection was brief and bittersweet—like it was brought back from the dead just long enough for us to say our good-byes. There’s even an epilogue here, take for example, NBC’s Chuck: A show that’s never had the right ratings for survival but a vociferous, savvy, Twittering fan base there to have kept it afloat long enough for the production to go five seasons and draw its own self to a close.

So, that’s today, with the IN-TER-NET. Let’s talk Star Trek. 1960’s Star Trek. The visions and the settings may be different, but I’m reminded that Firefly and Trek are siblings in television history. The first two seasons of Trek suffered in the ratings and that led NBC to cancel the series. A grassroots fan campaign brought the series back to life for a third and final season. Sound familiar? Except this was before this IN-TER-NET thing! Incredible.

Throughout the 70’s Trekkies (My own preferred term—now you know) kept this thing percolating and ta-da, Star Trek: The Next Generation. Now, we’ve had the pilot episode Encounter at Farpoint and you know what? It was kinda neat, kinda exciting, and certainly worthy of further exploration. Then, The Naked Now burns through the benefit of the doubt surplus so handily I am led to wonder how TNG ever survived.

The episode starts with our new heroes responding to a distress call from the Tsiolkovsky (I had to look that one up because the characters say the name like Boo trying to pronounce ‘Mike Wazowski’ in Monsters, Inc.). The odd bit is that the distress call sounds more like a cell phone call from inside the confines of a raucous frat party. Humorously enough the suspicions are confirmed pretty quickly when an away team beams over and finds the corridors strewn with what look like space-aged beer funnels.

It’s a little silly, but so far the episode isn’t actually doing so bad because there’s actually a decent silliness to creepiness contrast that’s not a very common mix. It all goes terribly wrong when the story makes its way back to the Enterprise. Quickly.

I mean, the crew starts with an alert response to the crisis, as in, they immediately consider a viral contamination as a possible explanation. We know this because on the beam back the away team is fully decontaminated via the transporters. There, good, now what’s the next step? For one thing, it’s not the cavalier approach to LaForge almost instantly appearing to be symptomatic of something. I’m sure he’s fine. And two, the only thing the crew decides to Space Google is Riker’s weak sense that somewhere, somehow, he’d once heard of “someone in the shower with clothes on.”

Truly bizarre, right? Here, let’s go behind the curtain. Back on 60’s Trek there was an episode known as The Naked Time where the same virus now affecting the TNG crew famously caused George Takei’s Sulu to swordfight half-naked in the hallowed corridors of the original Enterprise. I’m willing to bet you’ve seen the clip used for a spoof on YouTube, if not, go ahead, because there’s some really good ones out there. Riker’s odd remembrance is a direct reference to the original Star Trek episode.

That’s a big reason this episode fails. It tries to do too much. It tries to reference the original series but in so doing creates an odd plot hole where characters in this new present can’t efficiently respond to a disaster from a famous past (Dr. Crusher uses the original antidote about halfway through this trod and nope, doesn’t work. Why? Just doesn’t. Later she fixes it. Why? Just does!) It also tries to get the egg cracked on these new characters, hey, get ‘em “drunk” and we can see their secret desires, but it’s messy and there’s big hunks of shell in the frypan.

Let’s run it down. We learn that Geordi just wants to see like a real boy (the blind guy wants to see… alright, we’re taking some leaps here). Tasha Yar wants to come-on-get-happy because some bad people have done some bad things to her. Data was apparently partly designed to be a—shudder—robot sex slave. Troi hears the voices in her head including one that let’s her know she still wants some Riker action. Wesley Crusher wants power and fame equivalent to his boy geniousness. Beverly Crusher has woman needs and she’d be all right with having Captain Picard’s help with this, Picard finds the feelings to be mutual—very mutual. Finally, I guess we see that Riker is a functional drunk, and, did I miss anyone? Oh, and Worf’s a Klingon, so there’s that.

It’s awkward and bad. Bad, bad, bad. Data is one of my favorite characters and in this episode he is gross and detestable. My young self, likely through a lack of comprehension, used to forgive sex toy data and his romp with saucy Tasha Yar and her odd pasted down Superman curl of hair. It’s probably because we will get to watch Data grow nostalgic about this very human day in his past. So much so that it becomes an integral part of his story, much like embarrassing moments in our own lives.

The episode wraps up with the cure found and Wesley Crusher saving the day. This is after he uses a fancy voice changer to wrest control of the ship away from the actual, you know, crew, and in fact causes the very disaster scenario he’s destined to solve. Somehow, in a final off note for this episode, this earns the pesky brat more pats on the back than raps on the knuckles and tralalalala—away we go—next episode, please.

This is going to become my favorite show? Yep. Somehow. This is where I imagine the fans to come in. It’s an adoption that makes the show very nearly human. Like Firefly fans were able to awaken their lost love for one last romance, Star Trek fans will allow this child of a series to grow, make mistakes, and do amazing things with them. They are improbable stories, almost as fantastic and inspiring as the ones which will eventually grace our screen, and why I’m inspired to write about these stories, write my own, and live my own.

Lord, that’s cheesy. Eh, so is Star Trek.

Image via Wikipedia

There’s no way to pin down the exact date in time where I first saw an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Likewise, there’s no way to quantify the day I moved from seeing an episode for the first time and becoming a Star Trek fan. Twenty years ago, a nice round number and as good a guess as any, I was nine years old. I would have wrapped up fourth grade, a year of intense bullying and not entirely coincidental first signs of academic faltering—the worst year of my young life. TNG was wrapping up its fourth season and had just wrapped up arguably its best season ever. It was officially established as a worthy successor to the original and already stood on its own as one of the best science fiction shows of all time. We were meant for each other.

Like many real stories of true love TNG and I did not immediately find each other. Our start was rather auspicious in fact, like trying onion rings for the first time—it takes time to establish how great is the good and how awful is the bad. Perhaps my ability to overcome my first experience with TNG it is proof of just how drawn to the show I was.

I remember distinctly walking into the family TV room, an adult show on the TV, my father in his chair. My queries were answered patiently, I learned the show’s title, and maybe I gleaned some concept of… concept. Whatever I first learned as my dad explained Star Trek to me was short lived. My first viewing was cut very short. The episode on the screen was a repeat from season one, the infamous Conspiracy, and I had just stepped into the scene most infamous. Moments into my first viewing of Star Trek, a man was ripped apart by phaser fire, exposing an alien bug living in his exploded torso. I left the room, shaken.

While that memory is seared into my mind I can’t recall anything specific about how I crawled back to that television. Week after week I needed to learn more. This was my first adult show. My first exposure to “repeats.” My first understanding of “ratings,” or “syndication.” Character death. Character romance. Characters! Hope! Aspiration! This was my show, this was my childhood.

Star Trek: The Next Generation, as of July 1, 2011, is available for streaming, in its entirety, on Netflix. Since it has been available it has occupied my TV nearly every free hour of my day. Firefly is a must-see experience… and I love LOST, but this, this, this is my favorite show of all time. After a half-month of hunting and pecking for my favorite episodes, and after gaining some inspiration from the excellent TNG blog at the Onion AV Club, I realized there is a project here I almost have to do.

Although I highly doubt I can ever finish this, boot up your Netflix, set phasers to nostalgic, and trek through my memories while I watch the show that made me.

TNG premiered in 1987, some 20 years after the original (Twenty is a catchy number!) “The next generation” is a clunky tag, but could it be any more appropriate? As a child of baby boomers, the original Trek was for my parents, and TNG was for me. The original deserves a mention here. Oh, I’ve seen it. Oh, I respect what it tried to do, what it did do, and what it meant to my mother, but it will always be a show from the 60’s—a time I didn’t experience, and the disconnect will always be there.

When Encounter at Farpoint debuted, however, I wasn’t really a guarantee. My parents, fans of the former series, were. This made the new series painfully try to live up to its prototype in its early days—just like a bad spin-off but without the usual benefit of an actual former series regular. (Actually, McCoy is going to make an appearance here, but it looks like someone frosted his face with pancake batter). It wasn’t the series I grew to love, but it’s like sticking your nose in beer wort, when you know where the final product came from, you respect the beauty of the aging process.

What surprised me most about Encounter was just how not bad it was. The problem with this pilot is that it’s trying really hard to be two things: a pilot that introduces each character as completely as possible, and an action packed 1980’s made for TV sci-fi movie. It’s a problem for all pilots, even the great Firefly pilot Serenity felt clunky and forced in places, but on TNG the forced character backgrounds are a jarring surprise. That off-putting feeling, however, is not being fair to what Encounter is trying to do, it’s trying to introduce me to people I don’t know when, oops, I know these characters inherently. That’s why, as a writer, I found myself fascinated by Encounter.

There are some crucial character interactions in this pilot. Commander Riker is reunited with his Imzadi (which in Betazoid apparently means mega lover?), Counselor Troi, and while they feign indifference to one another in front of Captain Picard the view is treated to their telepathic soap opera dialog. Picard tests Riker as his new second in command with an unnecessary manual maneuver of the Enterprise—which apparently works because it immediately leads to a terrible conversation where Picard explains that he hates the kids these days and he’s going to need Riker’s help not being such an old man. There’s a truly great scene, a testament to actual decent expository writing and Patrick Stewart’s acting dynamo, where the Captain attempts to save face with his new Doctor, Beverly Crusher, by letting her leave her new post. In her flat refusal to accept pity we learn her prior acquaintance with Picard and that it somehow has to do with the death of her husband.

As a lifelong fan I know all that. The question, then, is why? Do I know facts because they’ve been established in these expository scenes of the pilot? Or, did I come to know it over time because of my faithfulness to these characters and their premise? I suppose what becomes truly great about TNG is that all of this overt characterization will eventually disappear below the surface of these characters, like the way the cops act on Law & Order, and that while these people may be dealing with deep, personal demons they will actually go on to be the best, and highest achieving officers in Starfleet. Instead of hashing themselves out and reorganizing their social structure on a weekly basis like Grey’s Anatomy doctors, these characters will spend the rest of the series being exactly who they are and associating with their comrades at an almost—human—speed.

While meeting the new characters and the sexy new ship is fun with only a few missteps (early data is too smirky, smarmy, and, well, icky) the movie in which they play is unfortunately muddled and at times tedious. I don’t hate it. I just eventually wanted it to be over.

The first mission of the new Enterprise is to go check out the mysterious Farpoint Station for reasons none other than its, uh, mystery. On the way they’re attacked by a space fishnet that makes banging garbage can sounds. This net is created by the omnipotent creature known as Q. John de Lancie’s Q, although my mother hates him for being mean, is instantly captivating. What is instantly gratifying is that Q is precociously malevolent and Picard handles his appearance with both calm and gravitas. It really sells the whole Star Trek premise. Beings from other worlds can zap into existence on a spaceship and hey, it’s just another day at work.

Unfortunately it’s a bad day at work because Q is putting Picard and his people on trial for the savage nature of humanity. How’s that for some science fiction impetus? After Q freezer burns a crew member here and there Picard is forced to concede that human history has been rife with warfare. He asks that before being put to death that this version of humanity (Humanity 2.0?) be tested to prove that Q’s claims no longer ring true. Hey, sweet! Now we can use the original plot!

So, to make a long post short (Checking, nope, still quite long), the Picard kids figure out the mystery of Farpoint Station. With the help of the sudden appearance of a monolithic purple (There’s a lot of purpling) alien spacecraft and the emotional transference capabilities of a character we shall never see again in the run of TNG, I shall call her Useful Troi™, we learn that both spacecraft and space station are giant space aliens. They’re a sort of giant, glow-y jellyfish with the ability to turn energy into matter. The reveal is really quite beautiful except that during take off the space station jellyfish literally high fives the spacecraft alien on take off. Can someone do a YouTube riff where the episode pauses there and the song from the end of The Breakfast Club starts playing?

This is a pilot, through and through, but man, was it stronger than I remember. It gives me high hopes for this project. At Camp Fowler there is a famous staff meeting every year where the staff grapples with what evening tag games we’re going to run for each week of camp. There’s an adult sentiment that childhood needs to be rerun for others just the way we remembered our own. It’s a one-time-only commodity and historically trying to relive it results in failure and disappointment.

I feared that diving back into TNG with adult eyes would tarnish the memory, like trying to play tag in the forest with creaky knees and a newfound respect for fire ants. Here, even the scenes I dreaded, like Wesley Crusher (Oh, I’m sure we’ll get to him) barging onto the bridge, are just the way I remember.

Like Picard at the end of Farpoint, Let’s see what’s out there.

Engage.

Tonight was the first ever Connecticut hosted game night since I've moved here. It was much needed. I am convinced that dudes need, well, time with other dudes to survive. Plus, the male species seems to enjoy excuses to drink beer and the chance to mow down bags of chips. We had those consumables and an evening where the only drawbacks were our approaching bedtimes and unseasonable humidity. Here's what went down:

Arkham Horror (x1)

This game is a beast and ran the evening as it usually does. When a game features not one but two half-foot tall card decks and something around 20 total draw piles you know you're in for a mental workout.

It's a cooperative game which means the group wins or fails and the enemy here is the game mechanics themselves. The setting is that of the collective works of H.P. Lovecraft and his demonic visions which, incidentally, mean nothing to me. The Ancient One slumbers beneath Arkham all the same and it is up to the Investigators to keep him there or snuff him out. Tonight we drew Nyarlathotep, whatever that is, and as the game progressed we were sunk under piles of monsters and mayhem. It was not a lack of weaponry, which can sometimes be the case, and we were a touch low in the vital 'clue token' department, but tonight it seemed to just be in the cards that we had to go face to face with the beast. Actually, this is the kind of rules packed games that for every 10 rules you remember to follow you forget about 20 to 80. We forgot to awaken the Ancient One. So we did and then we took it on head on. This was probably the highest point of satisfaction in the evening as we wiped the floor with the baddie and won the game handily.

On to game two.

Pandemic (x2)

This was my first chance to get my dice rolling hands on this new legend in the cooperative gaming field. I found it as satisfying as I hoped. In this game the players are CDC scientists squashing out four strains of virus. It has the complexity I enjoy but an all important factor hard to find in the games I love. Speed. When Arkham ends I always feel like I ate too much at the Thanksgiving table and need to push away and rest awhile before I take another crack at the feast. As soon as game one of Pandemic ended I knew I needed a game two. I had the game learned in one setting and watching the little virus pieces fly around the globe with our researchers in hot pursuit was a thrill. In game one things got out of hand way to quick and North America exploded in a hot mess of disease meaning our demise. Game two was the exact opposite and if you feel disease free today, well, you can thank us.

Red November (x2)

Our nightcap was yet another cooperative masterpiece and the game I know best. The first I heard of this game was also the first time I knew I needed it. This scenario features a doomed submarine,check that, doomed gnome submarine and you and your friends must survive the catastrophe for a full sixty minutes to ensure your rescue.  With my dad, my girlfriend, and good friend Chris all familiar with subs in some way this seemed like the kind of thing that we were destined to all enjoy. Tonight the ship went down both times which is starting to tip the scales to more failures than successes in this one. As often happens in cooperative games this is probably a strong indicator that we're finally starting to know the rules well enough that we're actually following them.

Thanks to everyone who bought me games, expansions, and brews that make these nights possible!

Unfortunately I no longer own an iPhone, I now use an iPod touch. When that gets misplaced during your first trip to the Groton Public Library your options are considerably more murky.

I was really surprised when I fired up MobileMe in desperation 'Frankenbeaker' (Before my iPhone died it was known as 'Beaker' and I transplanted its brain into an iPod) showed up as a device I could contact using Find My iPhone. There is a smidgen of peace of mind that if the iPod ever gets connected to a located WiFi network it will lock itself and let me know.

Still, that's a lot of me packed into 8GB of space. So far I've changed passwords to my email, Twitter, Facebook, and I'm starting work on my bank accounts. Only email, Twitter, and Facebook automatically log the user in but I'd rather be safe then sorry with the accounts that actually matter. Can anyone think of anything else I can do?

Conclusion: Find My iPhone? Genius. For an iPod touch? Less so. Me? Idiot.

The movie had two very strong connections to my entertainment network.

Star Trek: The Next Generation was a huge part of my childhood. As a series it was just finishing up it's seventh season right around that time I was beginning wrap my mind around just what episodic television was. I didn't know how to tune into a specific time but thanks to syndication I knew that if I kept my TV tuned to TNT in the evenings I could follow the lives of my new heroes reasonably well. Early in my childhood the first season episode "Conspiracy" was one of the first things to give me nightmares when I caught the episode running on my parents' late night television surfing. That was a regretful glass of water. By the time the series was over I had grown up alongside the program, and "All Good Things..." became the first time I watched a television series finale.

Today both Lost and Fringe are on my "must catch" list much like TNG once was. Fringe is a bit of a TV rookie... so we'll set it aside. Lost on the other hand is the ultimate in ensemble cast programming. Just as Lost has Hurley episodes and Sawyer episodes that delight the fans who have anointed them their personal favorites, so too did the Star Treks. Trek also moved slow and stately through the show's chosen themes being quite preachy most of the time, earning it high marks under the columns of "cheesy" and "boring." Lost is far more manic ("We've got a problem," "Grab a gun!"), but aren't we still wondering why way back in season one Locke held up a black piece and a white piece to the camera sure to promise a series riddled with faith verse science explorations? Lost and Fringe also feature top notch production values, well, that makes them quite different from Star Trek which eternally strained against its budget in the age before computers. That just made me even more excited.

I had a lot riding on this reboot. 

And it all came out. Through my eyes mostly and a little bit out of my nose. Yes, I cried during the open. Before the title even rolled. While Michelle (my willing victim for the first viewing... my second, I, uh... I went by myself) laughed at me.

First, emotional things were happening on screen. That got me started. Second, my expectations for the new pacing, the new care and polish, and the new imagining of the universe were being met, already. Third, this was my childhood. Also, my parents' childhood. Something I had put in a plastic bin with the Matchbox cars and Legos and everything else that was only as good as I remembered. Something that I definitely watched grow up with me post Star Trek: TNG (a fine show known as Star Trek: DS9), veer too far off course (a mostly digestible show Star Trek: Voyager), and then finally lose its luster all together (I never watched Enterprise and for the longest time pretended that the last Star Trek movie before this one, a bleak thing known as Star Trek: Nemesis wasn't so bad.) 

I was so ready for this movie. I live in my childhood room now but everything that once was a part of that remains boxed and sad. My dreams are taking a little break right now and so were all the tools that made so much of my original imaginings possible. Over the weekend I got to see a part of my past "rebooted," maybe you've seen that word kicked around describing the new movie. It couldn't be more true. To say any further would spoil a story I want you to go see for yourself.

As soon as I leave the theater after this movie I think to myself, "More!" and "Do my Star Trek next!" 

Why do I have that feeling? Amongst all the explosions, the jumping, the falling, and the punching (oh, the punching) there's something else. It's hope. Hope that we're going to have the honor to live this imaginary universe all over again. Hope that it will continue to freaking rock. Hope that maybe one day we're going to shuttle about on gleaming starships and glorious planets. And maybe... hope that either that world, or imagining that world, would be something I get to be a part of.

Make it so!

Sometimes when I'm telling old stories from high school days I'll talk of a fellow named Chris. I usually follow that with a quantifier, for example, "You know about submarines, just like Chris, my old DM."

The two letter acronym is unfamiliar to the listener and they cock their head to the side quixotically.

"Oh, DM," I say, "You know, Dungeon Master."

The listener does not straighten their head. Sometimes they shake it from side to side, as though I were a puppy that piddled too far to the port side of the papers.

Dungeon Master as a relationship descriptor makes sense though, trust me. It's like saying my old employer, or my old ex-girlfriend... or perhaps most accurately, my former crack dealer.

I played with Legos straight up through my sophomore year of high school. And I don't mean built with, I mean played. Complete with dialog and mouth made explosion noises.

I had a lot of pent up imagination.

A good role playing session with friends is like injections of imagination straight to the heart.

There was a time when the over-turned canoe in our backyard could be used as a river raft, the New York state weed life crowding its sides reborn as wild Amazon jungle. The whiffle bat paddled the journey forward, or whacked a path as a machete,  and when enemies closed in it was brought to the eye, hands steadying the yellow barrel, and brandished as a shotgun.

The path of the imaginary buckshot was pre-ordained. The codes entered into tree bark keypads came from your own mind. If your friend was along for the journey the marketplace of perilous ideas would grow exponentially but so two would be the squabble for claiming them.

The genius of Dungeons and Dragons is that it added a loose framework of rules to our imaginations. There is uncertainty in the way the dice land on the table. There is the very real possibility that we'll fail. Even when we succeed we seek to continue on, just like our real lives we embrace our shared victories but the moments never seem finished, the game never seems won.

It's this sort of full immersion that makes people shake their heads at me. Like I've exposed a part of myself that they didn't really want to see. I remember being picked up from a five hour session and excitedly explaining to my mother how I rode my griffin through the rigging of the enemies sails, how I lost my arm in a vicious fight, or how I was granted divine powers from worshipping my pantheon of gods.

Yes, that's the cranial rotation inducing stigma. Certainly society has moved on from damning D&D as dangerous and instead focusing on video games and music videos, so, I'm not writing to defend it. I'm demanding you embrace it.

When was the last time you finished up a game of checkers and dreamt about life as the checker piece that night? When was the last time you sprung your friend out of jail, knocked the guards unconscious, took an arrow to the shoulder, made a daring leap into the moat when your previously made plans fell woefully apart, and barely escaped to the night... accruing no real injuries or suffering no real consequences for your actions? When was the last time you felt like a kid, perched on upside down boat in the woods, vanquishing foes with a yellow plastic weapon?

Chris, my old DM, e-mailed me about a week ago. We're trying to scheme a way to get back to that place we shared, that last great high we rode. We've been passing ideas back and forth lately and some things have been taking shape. A new group of heroes on a new boat with new dangers already threatening our survival. The dice may never tumble from the bag and strike the table but there has already been a tremendous amount of joy garnered from the brainstorming. As I fall asleep, I don't imagine the eight hours of work ahead of me,  instead I see vague visions of a rogue sailor donning a long brown coat, foolishly trying to use a weapon unfit for the sea but too prideful to compromise, and legions of his pursuers clouding the waters all around.

I've been having a good week.

Now if only we had this genius contraption. It's always nice to see college science applied to where the world truly needs it.

{Via: Engadget}

In the past this has led me to search for a solution and I've also given some quasi-flawed advice on the topic. Read on for my update on the problem:

Lithium ion rechargeables are found in gobs of our electronics now, essentially in anything with a bolted in battery or a large detachable battery pack. These guys are fussy animals. They like to have their electric juices kept busy. If they're operating the device on their own, slowly using power, they like that; it's their job. If they're being charged back up from some heavy use, that's great, too. It's good to remind them who they are with a full discharge every once in a while, but like chocolate cake, it's not therapy to be prescribed every day. Finally, they don't like being parked inside a hot computer fully charged and still plugged in. Under these conditions (in addition to regular use) they will slowly die.

I use(d) my laptop like many youths on the educational go do: Parked it at a desk where it's easy to use for weeks at a time, rarely shutting it down and keeping it plugged in. Then when it came time to meet somewhere off the plug, like the library or the coffee shop or the Adirondacks, the battery would only cough up an hour or two hours of use before it was back on the sweet nectar of American AC/DC. 

My work-around, and the advice I've given to many, had been to use the battery only when you need it. Throw it in your desk drawer while your computer is a desktop and throw in the fully charged brick when you needed to go rogue. When you did go untethered knock your screen down to as dim as you can stand. I used to be able to coax six hours of productivity out of that practice.

Well, not so fast.

You can still take screen dimming strategy as gospel truth in the world of laptops, but those batteries I told you to take out? Ya'll better cram them back in. Turns out intel driven notebooks are specifically designed to run slower without a battery inside... in case that YouTube binge you go on momentarily pushes the power draw of your computer past what the wall outlet was providing. Highly unlikely, but without the big battery to fall back on such an outage would attack the other tiny battery in your computer. Oh, what other battery? You know how your computer knows what time it is when you turn it on? Well, that isn't elf magic. Anyone who has an old laptop with a burnt out hardwired battery knows the funny time warp that happens when the dog pulls out the power chord of their battery-less computer.

Going battery commando is an imperfect practice and I hereby un-recommend it. Between having a computer run slow and having a computer that has to stay plugged in I think the smart choice is the better running computer.

So what's my replacement advice? From Apple's battery support page it's clear that there isn't good advice for those of who are cramming both the need of having a computer that's transportable and the need of just simply having a computer at all into one machine. We all use our laptops as our everything and many of us went in to debt just to achieve that much. Sorry Apple, but we can't "[not] plan on using [our] notebook[s] for more than six months." 

There's no real prescribed method here but I would suggest trying as best you can to use your new notebook like you do your cell phone or iPod. They've got the same battery guts inside and the practice of charging it at night while you use most of it's power during the day is serving those devices well. To those of us with dead batteries in our old laptops it's probably time to hang up the cleats and call it a desktop or make an offering to the Apple god's for a new battery. Update: If you do end up springing for a new battery, save it, and only use it when you're traveling. Leave your old battery in there and squeeze every last ounce of life out of it when you're in desktop mode. That way you don't sacrifice performance or battery life.

Or, win a million dollars.

(The Heathernet does not endorse or condone money as the solution to all problems.)

I see... Me

Let me be clear. My iPhone is the greatest computer I have ever owned. I can feel the tears of my iBook gathering on her keys as I openly tik-tak the words of my betrayal. My iBook, God bless her, doesn't fit in my pocket. My iBook, my tireless companion, does not have multi-touch. My iBook...uh, is... is not a woman, jeez, listen to yourself man!

About a half hour ago someone could have tapped me on the shoulder whilst I sat here at my desk and said, "Your obsession is showing."

Having a pretty good knowledge through internet rumors that an update for my phone would be hitting sometime today (that would be Friday, the day I haven't slept to get ready for yet,) I popped the iTunes update checker with a mouse click at precisely midnight central time. I had no planning on the time but it turned out to be a lucky guess because, sure enough, there was that exciting info box that told me it was time to start all those wonderful little swirly bars that come with downloading updates! 

I would say there are two big features to this update. First, podcasts are now downloadable over the 3G network, which really makes a pretty big leap forward in the usefulness of podcasts if you're someone out and about with headphones or a car system at all times. Second, and the feature represented by the iPhone screenshot up top, is the inclusion of Google Street View in the maps feature. To create that shot I simply typed in my address, tapped the Street View icon, and spun the "camera" around to make the image of me-headquarters. I am sitting in that very house, right now! That's my car in the driveway.

Useful? Well, we'll see. I imagine that for someone with my personality it will be. I'm a researcher, which means that before I do anything I like to be 98% to 100% sure that I'm right about my procedure. Now, when I'm cruizin' around, contemplating entering that building that I have the address for but never entered, I can pull the iPhone out and verify one last time that I'm good to go. All this fancy happens provided Streetview has mapped your area, mind you, and in this case Albany has been hyper-beamed to the internet. Huzzah! 

One more feature of the iPhone that will make people shudder when I show it to them while I squeal with glee!

Celebrating the soda

Now we'll never forget how stupid I was when the day finally comes that the doctor tells me to stop with the soda pop.