The Net(flix) Effect

With all the media hoopla around net neutrality and what a bandwidth hog Netflix apparently is, I can't help but reflect on how the streaming video service has changed my life in the past eight months.

I've had a DVD player for about 10 years and during that time I've amassed a pretty sizable disc library. It's the repeat of a pattern that happened with CDs, starting in the early '90s. Okay, so the same thing happened with vinyl and cassettes in the '80s, as well as with VHS tapes. Let's face it—I'm a media junkie and arguably in need of a 12-step program for my addiction.

So back to DVD's and Netflix. It didn't take too long after I acquired a DVD player to begin feeding my addiction by acquiring a DVD burner for my computer. This, coupled with a subscription to Netflix's original DVD by mail service, led to a “mainline” addiction in which I burned copies of almost every Netflix DVD that hit my mailbox.

I eventually canceled my Netflix subscription when my personal fortunes began took a tumble and I set about cutting non-essentials, including cable TV. For several years, I learned to live with an antenna and let the public library feed my DVD addiction for free. Now, that's what I call putting my tax dollars to work!

Eventually, I began to occasionally indulge in the occasional $5 DVD from the big bins at Wal-Mart and even cheaper $3 discs from Big Lot's, supplemented by the occasional visit to Redbox. My rationalization was that I was spending far less on this habit than I would have on a monthly cable bill.

Over the past couple of years, my personal economy has seen a vast improvement and last summer, I decided to reward myself with a flat screen TV and a Blu-Ray player. While I did pick up a few Blu-Ray discs, I came to the conclusion they didn't live up to the hype. But I became increasingly curious about the little “Netflix” button on the remote.

I resisted pushing it for about five months, but over the holidays, my resolve weakened and my viewing habits instantly changed. I've almost entirely quit watching broadcast TV (no great loss there) and the disc tray on my Blu-Ray player has remained mostly empty. I've even put streaming media boxes on my other two TV sets.

The biggest and most profound effect Netflix has had on me is that it instantly and single-handedly broke me of my DVD addiction. I haven't bought a single disc—nor have I wanted to—since I got Netflix eight months ago. The funny thing is I'm not even tempted by them the way I used to be.

Has Netflix truly broken me of that addiction or is it more like Methadone—a more benign version of the same old addiction? It's hard to tell. I still binge watch movies and TV shows on Netflix much the way I did on DVD—and VHS, for that matter. But I'm not filling my shelves with the physical artifacts of my addiction. Also, I'm spending less to do it. Before Netflix, I was spending much more than $8 a month on DVDs.

So in the end, maybe I'm still a media addict, but so far I've managed to avoid expanding into other similar vices like Hulu Plus.  

Old Mac Gets a New Lease on Life

So I've been using this MacBook Pro with Mac OS X 10.7 (Mountain Lion) for the past year and a half or so, and it's generally been a good machine, despite a few quirks. Being slightly outdated hardware, I had resigned myself to the idea that I would be stuck in the past as new versions of the OS passed it by. What I had was working reasonably well and I'm also a bit of a cheapskate when it comes to paid upgrades. There has to be a compelling reason for me to shell out the cash and I darned well better be getting a good discount.

I've been relatively content with 10.7 since it allows most current software to run on my six-year-old laptop, but when I read that the latest Mac OS X 10.9 (Mavericks) had been released earlier this week with an unbeatable price tag of zero, as in free, and that it was (just barely) compatible with my machine, I couldn't resist. And as it turns out, I'm glad I didn't.

The biggest challenge I had installing the new OS was clearing off enough space to download the sucker. I'm bad for letting things accumulate on my hard drive, so I didn't have the requisite 5 GB of space available. Fortunately, I did have an empty 32GB flash drive handy, so transferring and deleting files was easily accomplished. Of course, the next challenge to my patience was actually downloading a file that large. Good thing I have other computers I can use.

I don't know exactly how long the download took, because I just started it and put the MacBook aside for the night and let the download proceed unsupervised. When I got back to it the next afternoon, the upgrade was ready to install, which still took a couple of hours.

My previous experience with upgrading to the latest version of a software title on an older piece of hardware has usually been disappointing in that performance slows to a crawl, and being that my MacBook Pro is one of the oldest machines for which this upgrade is available, I had a fear that the same would prove true in this case. Fortunately, my fears proved unfounded. Not only did it not slow the computer down, it actually sped it up!

Among the numerous improvements under the proverbial hood, Mavericks makes more efficient use of RAM and processor cycles, which improves performance and extends battery life on a laptop. Because it uses RAM more efficiently, it requires less virtual memory, which presses hard drive space into use to supplement physical RAM. This translates into more available hard drive space! I call that a win, win, win scenario. All that efficiency is also allowing the cooling fan to work a little less.

Applications that traditionally struggled a bit under 10.7 are now purring along nicely. It even cleared up an annoying bug in the free LibreOffice office suite. Ever since version 4.1 came out earlier this year, text has appeared jumbled on the screen when I'm typing, but resolves itself in a second or two after I stop. That simply doesn't happen under 10.9

When you throw in the various interface enhancements and new applications like iBooks and Maps, that originated on the iPhone and iPad, there is really no reason not to upgrade if your Mac is less than six years old (check Apple's Web site for a complete list of compatible models), has at least 4GB of RAM, and is already running OS X 10.6 or newer. It really is a no-brainer.

Words of My Namesake

Henry Edwin Tremain (1840-1910)

 The past few days, when I should have been engaged in more productive tasks, I have been connecting with my namesake. He's not an ancestor, but a friend of my great grandmother for whom my grandfather, and subsequently my father and I were named. The irony of this is that being a good Southern boy, born and raised in the Carolinas, four generations of my family (including my nephew, who bears the middle name) have been named for a 'Yankee' general.

I have known since I was a small child that I bear two thirds of the name of General Henry Edwin Tremain (1840-1910) who served with distinction in the Civil War (he referred to it in his writings as the 'War of Rebellion'), and earned the Medal of Honor for riding his horse between two columns of Union troops who were mistakenly firing on each other*. I have also long been aware that Tremain wrote several books on the war and subsequent reconstruction, which have become somewhat obscure more than a century after his death—until now.

It seems that while time was not on the books' side for a long time, the fact that they have all passed into the public domain will ultimately ensure their survival. Many of his book- and pamphlet-length writings, including: In Memoriam, Major-General Joseph Hooker (1881); Sailor's Creek to Appamattox Court House, 7th, 8th, and 9th April, 1865, or, Last Hours of Sheridan's Cavalry (1885); The Closing Days About Richmond, or, The Last Days of Sheridan's Cavalry (1900); Last Hours of Sheridan's Cavalry—A Reprint of War Memoranda (1904); Two days of War: A Gettysburg Narrative and Other Excursions (1905); Sectionalism Unmasked (1906); and A Family Genealogy (1908) are now preserved electronically by the Archive.org, OpenLibrary, and GoogleBooks Web sites.

These electronic versions are available in a number of file formats Some are physical page-by-page image scans of the original volumes, usually library copies, which are interesting to me as much for their content as for the unaltered glimpse they offer of the original, including library stamps pencil marks, and at least some illustrations. Versions compatible with e-readers like the Nook or Kindle are based on OCR (optical character recognition) scans, which transfer the type on the page into an editable text file. While these files are considerably smaller than their image scanned counterparts, they seem to include an inordinate number of electronically-induced errors that seldom get edited out before the document goes live online.

Sadly, these flawed scans sometimes also serve as the basis for some of the overpriced print-on-demand editions presently published by the likes of Nabu Press and Kessenger Publishing and sold through a variety of online sources including Amazon, Alibris and AbeBooks. Some these are even so shabbily done as to include a Google Books digital watermark on their pages. Even so, some versions like Kessenger's hardback editions, can command prices that approach those of the hardback first editions.

I recently purchased a soft cover reprint of Last Days of Sheridan's Cavalry from Nabu Press and was favorably impressed with it, for what it is. Made from the PDF image files available online for free, the type is quite readable, except for one page that I finally figured out was a page of translucent tissue paper that separated the title page from a portrait of General Sheridan. and although a pull-out map located between pages 82 and 83 is replaced with a blank page, it gives a reasonable approximation of the experience of reading the original first edition.  For a scholar intent on closely studying these texts with highlighter in hand, these reprints are an invaluable resource; however, collectors will likely find them somewhat lackluster.

Until the digital revolution, the only one of Tremain's books to enjoy any sort of revival is Sectionalism Unmasked, a treatise on the (mis)treatment of blacks in the South in the years following the Civil War, which was re-published in 1969 by the Negro Universities Press (NUP). It seems that Tremain, a lifelong Republican, had a very progressive mindset for his time, although the Republican Party of a century ago was far more progressive than today's GOP. Today, the NUP edition is the most affordable of his books, selling for between $6 and $9. 

More desirable to collectors are his volumes on the Civil War, which he called 'war memoranda'. They are largely based on his first-person experiences and observations. As a Southerner, it's interesting to read his Northern perspective, related in a fairly objective, highly detailed, and reporterly fashion without excessive edtorializing or propagandizing. The mind of an officer who later became a lawyer comes through in these accounts.

Tremain appears to have published three different accounts of the closing days of the war, Sailor's Creek to Appamattox Court House, 7th, 8th, and 9th April, 1865, or, Last Hours of Sheridan's Cavalry (1885); The Closing Days About Richmond, or, The Last Days of Sheridan's Cavalry (1900); Last Hours of Sheridan's Cavalry—A Reprint of War Memoranda (1904), each incorporating and expanding upon the previous one.

Besides reading over the online versions of his books, I have added a few physical volumes to my library. My father gave me a first edition of Sectionalism Unmasked for Christmas. He said he had bought it a few years ago, but the subject matter didn't interest him. What I found at least as interesting as the book itself were the promotional leaflets for Last Days of Sheridan's Cavalry and Two Days of War that were tucked inside the cover. In addition to the print-on-demand copy of Last Days of Sheridan's Cavalry, I have also bought a first edition of Two Days of War. As I am not a Civil War scholar, I'm not sure these books would have interested me as much had I not had a family connection to the author, but I am none the less pleased to have his work represented on my bookshelves.


Update 3/19/13:
After spending a little time with the various copies of Tremain's work that I have recently acquired, I find it interesting that I relate to them quite differently. When handling the first editions of Two Days of War and Sectionalism Unmasked, I feel a direct connection to the past. These books are more than 100 years old and are historical artifacts in their own right. Almost as nice is my hardcover reprint of Sailors Creek to Appamattox Court House from Repressed Books. The publisher's stated intention is to approximate as closely as possible the antiquarian reading experience and this effort is largely successful. Printed on good quality paper, it appears to be a physical scan of the original, but the scanned image has been substantially cleaned up as very few stray marks appear, unlike the softcover reprint of Last Hours of Sheridan's Cavalry.  Printed on comparatively cheap paper, this volume is functional, but it has all the charm of a college course pack. The pages are readable but it is obvious they are printed directly from the page scans available online for free. No effort has been made to clean them up in any way.  In the long run, I think I would have been happier with a hardbound reprint or to have held out for an affordable first edition.

Update 4/15/21:
A few of years before he passed away, Dad acquired first editions of Last Hours of Sheridan's Cavalry and Two Days of War, which I now have in my possession. The former is in nice condition and I'm happy to have it as an upgrade to the print-on-demand copy but the latter is a battered ex-library copy for which he paid nearly twice what I paid for my copy. He said he'd had a line on what he thought was a better one but someone beat him to it. I never had the heart to tell him that the "someone" in question was very likely me.


____________________
*If this scenario sounds slightly familiar, it's because you probably saw it in a movie. Kevin Costner's character did a similar thing at the beginning of Dances with Wolves (1990). Of course, fact and fiction quickly diverge. Unlike Costner's character, Tremain was not wounded, nor was he attempting to commit suicide when he rode his horse between the troops. He also was never sent to a deserted outpost in 'Indian Territory'. I have long wondered if screenwriter and novelist Michael Blake based this scene in his fictional story on Tremain's real life exploit.

Re-opening the Mind's Eye

As far back as my high school and college days, I was always an avid photographer. I discovered and leaned to use single lens reflex (SLR) cameras in high school and started accumulating an assortment of manual focus Minolta gear while I was in college and for several years thereafter. Through most of the '80s and early '90s, I used it on an almost daily basis, especially when I worked for a community newspaper. I was hired as a reporter, but when they found out I had a camera and knew my way around a darkroom, I was suddenly pulling double duty, creating both words and images. Not only was it fun, it was job security.

I left the paper in the summer of 1991 to start graduate school and began using my cameras less and less, especially as I developed an interest in computers. There just wasn't time for everything. By the end of the decade, my interest in photography eventually had all but died along with the medium of film in the face of digital photography. A big part of it was that I never could afford the kind of digital camera equipment I really wanted.

Even going back to the film days, I never really warmed to auto-focus, point-n-shoot cameras. I always over-thought their capabilities and was usually frustrated with the results. When it comes to photography, I'm a bona fide control freak. You see, I really like twiddling knobs, adjusting focus, f-stops and shutter speeds and screwing on filters to make the final image match what's in my mind's eye

On several occasions over the years, I borrowed digital SLR cameras from others and quickly realized that was the type of hardware I needed if I wanted to get back into photography. Unfortunately, they commanded prices comparable to a monthly house payment and thus far above my comfort level. One of the nice things about 35mm SLR camera equipment back in the day was the technology had been around for a long time and there was a wealth of excellent second hand equipment available at affordable prices, enabling one to afford the good stuff without making a sacrificial outlay of funds. Fortunately, digital photography has finally matured to the level that the same is beginning to be true for it.

I was recently re-bitten by the digital camera bug when my dad showed me a Nikon D50 DSLR camera he'd gotten on the cheap. I found the the controls of the camera to be a little too fussy--and sometimes just plain counter-intuitive--for my taste, but it planted the idea in my mind that maybe the time had come to re-examine the notion of finding one for myself. After some investigation online, I discovered there is indeed a lively market for used DSLR hardware and some nice bargains to be had.

Eventually, I lucked up on a Samsung GX-1L camera kit that included a nice 18-55mm zoom lens for about the price of a mid-range point-n-shoot. The camera and lens are re-branded Pentax hardware, despite the fact that the lens carries the venerable Schneider-Kreutznach name, which Samsung licensed for the occasion. I rounded the kit out with a nice, used Sigma 70-210mm zoom lens for about the cost of a movie ticket and popcorn, and a dedicated flash module for my Quantaray flash that allows it to be fully compatible with this camera.

What really amazes me about this camera is not its ease of use or the fantastic photos it takes, although both statements are true, but the way it has unlocked a part of my brain--or maybe my soul--that has lain dormant far too long. I'm seeing the world with a photographer's eye again. Even when the camera isn't in my hands, I find myself framing things up as though in a viewfinder and observing the fine details I would want to capture on film, or rather, pixels. For the first time in a good 15 years or so, I find myself wanting to just go out with my camera and see what I can find to shoot.

In short, my mind's eye has been re-opened and it's good to be back in the viewfinder again!

Below are a few of my favorite shots so far:

Two Weekends, Two Operating Systems

I didn't really plan it this way, but I've experienced a whirlwind of technology upgrades in the past couple of weeks. Two Saturdays ago, I upgraded my HP laptop to the just released Xubuntu 12.04 and last week, I acquired a second hand MacBook Pro running the latest Mac OS X 10.7 "Lion".

Two weeks ago, I had no idea either upgrade was in my near future, but I do tend to take things as they come. My aging G5 iMac and G4 Powerbook are both running outdated versions of Mac OS X and aren't capable of upgrading past version 10.5, I'd pretty much written off the idea of moving up until I had enough spare change to invest in one of the newer (well, not that new since they've been around since 2005 or so) Intel-based Macs.

Upgrades for Linux distributions come so frequently and are usually such a pain to install, that I had decided to wait until support for the version I was running (11.10) had ended. Besides, I had just installed Xubuntu 11.10 when it came out last fall and had just gotten everything where I was happy with it. In my previous experience, upgrading a Linux distribution meant erasing the hard drive and starting over from scratch. This is something I was in no hurry to do.

One thing I've grown quite accustomed to with any Linux distro I've used is the frequent software update notifications. When I was checking my e-mail before going to bed one recent Friday night, I was not at all surprised when one popped up on the menu bar. What I wasn't prepared for was the large button waiting for me when I opened the dialog box, inviting me to click it and upgrade my OS. I was reluctant at first, but eventually, like Alice with the cake that said "eat me" and the bottle that said "drink me," I let curiosity get the better of me and I clicked it.

After clicking through a seemingly endless dialog boxes designed to make absotively, posilutely sure I wanted to go through with the upgrade, the download began and I went to bed. I figured when I woke up in the morning the whole process would be done or I would have to click a couple more 'okay' buttons to make the installation happen.

As it turned out, the latter scenario was more nearly correct, but I had to wait a little longer for the download to finish since it had stopped when the computer went into sleep mode shortly after I did the night before. It took about two hours for the download and the subsequent installation to finish, but once the computer restarted itself, booting into Xutbuntu 10.4, it was almost like nothing had changed. All my settings and accounts were intact, just like I'd left them, but the operating system and most of the software applications had been upgraded to the newest versions available. It was, by far, the smoothest OS upgrade I had experienced on any platform.


The second of my back-to-back upgrades came just a week later when I sold a pair of old military sunglasses on eBay for almost enough to cover the cost of a newer Mac. Although I have always kept a desktop Mac as my primary computer ever since graduate school more than 20 years ago, I have in recent years begun using my laptops almost exclusively with the iMac acting mainly as a print server and disc burning station.

After reading a news report speculating that Apple was on the verge of discontinuing the 17-inch MacBook Pro because of low demand, I decided to price them on eBay and compare them with the 15-inch models. I was amazed to discover that the price difference on used models in the two screen sizes was almost negligible. That was good news for me because while I find my PowerBook's 15-inch screen adequate, I prefer the more spacious 17-inch screen on my iMac. It didn't take me long to find a good deal on a 17-inch model, which could effectively replace both the iMac and the PowerBook as my primary computer. 

But getting used to Lion, as the latest version of Mac OS X is nicknamed, took a little effort. There are a lot of subtle differences that made navigation--at least at first--a little difficult, not the least of which is the lack of arrows on the scroll bars!

Really! No arrows? It seems that Apple, in its infinite wisdom, decided we didn't need them anymore. This seems like the same mindset that for years kept Mac users stuck with a single mouse button and a ctrl-click to mimic a right click. Instead, they've given us a two-fingered mouse gesture on the track pad that will achieve the precise scrolling formerly offered by the arrows. As with single-button mice, there is also the option of a third-party mouse with a scroll wheel.

If that weren't enough, the very act of scrolling was made more difficult by reversing its direction, meaning you have to scroll 'down' in order to go 'up' to the top of the screen and vice versa. Okay, I know Apple's marketing slogan a few years ago was "Think Different" but that doesn't mean you have to think stupid. Fortunately, this little feature, along with the elimination of desktop icons to represented mounted hard drives, flash drives, optical discs, and network drives, were easily remedied by making a few clicks in the System Preferences.

Either way, it's nice having new toys.

I'm a Toolaholic!

So the past few weeks I've been doing a fair amount of work on my car, and last weekend as I was finishing up a project, I managed to break a ratchet from a cheap socket set. It was a $4.00 socket set from Harbor Freight, so no big deal, right?

Now, a rational person would have simply replaced the ratchet and maybe even upgraded from the cheapest Chinese crap Harbor Freight had to offer, but not me, not by a long shot. This was an excuse for an all-out shopping spree!

It started innocently enough with a quick check of eBay to see what a used Craftsman 3/8-inch drive ratchet could be had for. I ended up getting one for $6 plus shipping. Not bad and definitely better than what it was replacing. Mission accomplished? Nah, my watch list was filled with too many other good deals like that 37-piece socket set with two ratchets in different sizes for a mere $5 plus shipping. Had to have it. You can never have too many sockets, right?

With that in mind, I turned around and bought a 1/4-inch drive Craftsman ratchet and a set of 10 deep wall sockets to go with the 3/8 ratchet I'd already gotten. And then there was that little trip to Lowe's that turned up a 42-piece Kobalt socket set on sale for $24.98. That was too good to pass up when the whole set was the same price as the ratchet alone. I'm still trying to figure that one out. I think it comes down to high markup on the ratchet.

A note on Kobalt tools: Lowe's introduced the Kobalt brand in 1998 to compete with Craftsman. Initially produced by J.H. Williams, maker of Snap-On tools, Production was shifted to Danaher, which also produced Craftsman, in 2005. Today's Kobalt tools, while still of good quality, are sourced from a Taiwanese manufacturer.

So by the end of the week, my eBay tool purchases started rolling in. The 37-piece socket set was great. It was an older, no-name set that would be name-brand quality by today's standards. Quite serviceable and a good value for what I had paid. If this was the only thing I had gotten, my needs would have been satisfied.

That Craftsman ratchet that started this whole buying spree off was another story. The mechanism was frozen up. Useless. Fortunately, Sears guarantees their hand tools for life, so a quick exchange netted me a rebuilt ratchet that was better than brand new. I say better because Craftsman has recently begun sourcing most of their hand tools from China and the quality is visibly less than the older models. The handles are thinner, the steel is likely weaker, and the little directional switch is made of plastic. My refurbished ratchet was made in the USA and had a metal directional switch. Better than new. The other Craftsman tools I bought, being 'new old stock' were also made in USA.

So all told, the loss of a ratchet from a $4.00 socket set prompted me to spend about $90.00 on five ratchets, three nut driver handles, more than 100 sockets and accessories, and a tool box to put it all in. Is it overkill or an overdue upgrade? Do you think I may need a 12-step program or a project on which to put these tools to use?

Smart Phone: a couple of weeks Later...

Okay, so I've had this Motorola Atrix 4G smart phone for a couple of weeks now and all I can say is I'm glad I only paid a penny for it. Yeah, it's a cool gadget and all, but I'm on my laptops so much I really find its computing function to be superfluous.

When the late Steve Jobs introduced the first iPhone and with it the era of the touch screen smart phone, he characterized it as three new devices in one: a new iPod with a touch screen, a phone, and a mobile computing device. That's a pretty fair assessment of not only the iPhone's functionality but that of every touch screen smart phone out there, regardless of manufacturer or operating system. So let's see how the Atrix stacks up in these three areas:

Music player--To be honest, I really haven't yet had the opportunity to do much testing in this area. There was one mp3 file on the 512 megabyte micro SD card that I transferred over from the RAZR and that played just fine. I just bought a 32 gigabyte card online, so I'm looking to do a bit more testing when it arrives. Since I have Macs and a Linux laptop, the only way to get music onto the phone seems to be download it over the Internet on the phone itself or plug the micro SD card into a USB adapter and copy files over from my computer as if it were a flash drive. That's simple enough except for having to remove and replace the fingernail-sized memory card.

Phone--As I mentioned before, the sound quality on the Atrix is every bit as good as that of the RAZR, but there are two areas where it doesn't stack up so well. First is the user interface. Making and answering calls is simply a more complex task. I miss being able to answer the phone with the Captain Kirk 'whip-n-flip' maneuver--whipping out the phone and flipping open the cover with one hand in a single, fluid motion and hanging up simply by flipping the phone closed again, also with one hand. On the Atrix--or any smart phone for that matter--it's a two-handed, multi-step operation. This burying of the phone function is yet further reinforcement of the idea that a smart phone is not primarily a voice communication device but a mobile computing device, a touch-screen PDA with integrated telephony.

So how does it stack up as a computing device? For me, it's not that great. I went through a PDA phase back in the early 2000s with a couple of Palm devices and a PocketPC device and right now, I'm feeling a great sense of deja vu. It's a neat gadget, and it's pretty cool to be able to check my e-mail or Google something while I'm in the grocery store or wherever, but at the end of the day, it has little real utility for me. As I said earlier, I'm at my computers for so much of any given day that adding an additional means of data access just isn't a life changer for me. But then again, maybe I just haven't found that killer app yet. For now, when it comes to computing, I'll just stick to my computers.

One final note is on battery life, which seems to be a real problem for many smart phones. When I'm teaching, especially afternoon and evening classes, I see students scrambling for seats closest to the walls so they can plug in their smart phones to charge them. I have been pleasantly surprised to find that is not the case with my Atrix. Granted, it's not as good as the RAZR, but it's definitely acceptable. While I could go two or three days between charges on the RAZR, unless I had a marathon phone conversation, the Atrix's battery lasts between one and two days.

I have invested in a second battery and an external cradle charger for the Atrix, as I did for the RAZR. This allows me to have a fully charged battery ready to go whenever the one in the phone becomes depleted. Charging time is only a few hours, so the odds of having both batteries drained at once are pretty slim. This is something I would not be able to do with an iPhone, which has a sealed case.

So, do I regret replacing my trusty, if aging, RAZR with a newfangled smartphone? Not really. I needed to learn about touch screens and such, and I'm sure I'll occasionally find a use for some of the phone's advanced functions, but it really isn't a life changer, nor did I expect it to be. The interesting thing is that while I no longer find myself envious of folks with smart phones, I still don't understand why they're such a big deal.

Once again, Mr. Spock's parting words to his rival, Stonn, in the Star Trek episode "Amok Time" ring true: "After a time, you may find that to have is not nearly so great a thing as to want."