Without an Apostrophe

So, barring any major catastrophe or perhaps a severe onset of procrastination I’ll be writing a post here every day this month.

Why?

Because I’m signed up for the WordCount 2010 Blogathon.

The purpose of the Blogathon is to unite freelance writers with a commitment to blog every day for the month of May.

Given my sparse posting on this, I figured I should join something in an attempt to up my game.

With any hope, I’ll make it through and perhaps be less procrastinaty (yes, I just made that word up) in the future.

I woke up this morning hoping by the end of the day I’d be either dead or hospitalized.

Dead or at the very least, in critical condition from laughing hard enough to soil myself and an overdose of schadenfreude when a tablet wasn’t announced at today’s Apple presentation.

This did not come to pass, but I feel the need to open a piece on the unfortunately named Apple iPad (every possible joke about the name has already been made, so I’ll refrain from even trying a new one) by saying this: the amount of hype and speculation over a device that until this morning didn’t even officially exist was an absolute embarrassment to my so-called profession.

As it turns out, Apple did indeed launch a nearly 10-inch tablet computer.

I didn’t watch the entire live feed of the presentation as it was getting awfully choppy and just sounded like some kind of experimental noise-rock album after a while, but what I did see, well, I have to confess – I was impressed.

I do like the concept of e-readers, particularly a device that would download the various newspapers I read automatically before I woke up and let me read them on the bus in a format that didn’t cause eye strain and allowed readers to experience the same nice designs and layouts that work on paper.

Also, I’ve said before that newspapers need to stick around in their paper form because I refuse to drag my laptop into the bathroom.

Well, the iPad provides the features of most e-readers in colour as well as running all the applications the iPhone can and with the $499 price on the base model, doesn’t even cost that much more.

But that’s where we start running into problems.

Specifically, the iPhone App Store.

Without jailbreaking (a process that gets undone every time there’s a software update) iPhone users are limited to using only the applications Apple decides they can use in the App Store.

Unless there’s a strange shift that I just don’t see happening, iPad users will have to live with having a single company deciding what software they can and can’t use the hardware they paid for and to me, that is unacceptable.

Which one of the publications I read could build a great looking application to bring their content to the iPad and have it rejected. (Apple has rejected apps for some pretty stupid reasons in the past.)

I’m mainly focusing on the use of the iPad as an e-reader because as a replacement for a computer, well, forget about it.

Many tech commentators said Apple killed the netbook with this announcement, but I just don’t see it.

A netbook is a small, low-cost computer that runs a full operating system on which I could install any software I want. Besides, for any serious work, I like having a physical keyboard with tactile feedback.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized I’m more interested in seeing what Apple’s competitors come up with in response to the iPad.

The next statement is going to sound ridiculous given my opening rant to this post but it won’t be the first time I’ve been a hypocrite and definitely won’t be the last.

I can’t imagine the insanely smart folks at Google haven’t seen this coming and haven’t been preparing an Android-powered response and I suspect that is the gadget I really want.

I’m late posting this, as always it seems.

But, that’s what I intend to change.

With a New Year ushered in, I’ve rebooted my web properties (though the blog transformation is not yet 100 per cent complete, I do like how my new portfolio site turned out.)

Anyway, as part of this “reboot,” I am going to start taking my blog more seriously including, hopefully, sticking to a regular posting schedule.

Aside from posting more, there will be a few more changes, like fixing this rather plain design soon.

While I still intend to focus the site’s topic on my love/hate relationship with technology, I’m going to try to do some more media commentary as well, ‘cause damnit, I have opinions and they’re important, too!

Finally, I might see if I can squeeze some money out of this site, if only enough to pay for the hosting. So, please bare with me while I experiment with some hopefully unobtrusive advertising and few other ways getting a few pennies out of page views.