One of my favorite things about being in Argentina is the opportunity to learn Spanish for real — I’d taken a few months of classes and have that stilted working knowledge which comes from classes which means that if I have time to think very carefully I could maybe construct and understand correct sentences, but at the speed of real conversation, all bets are off. So it was when we arrived here; being surrounded by Spanish (or Castellano, the Argentinian version), it’s not quite full immersion but there’s still plenty of opportunity for learning and I can feel my brain expanding day by day. Once you get to this point with a language, I find, it’s more important to just keep soaking it up, forward forward forward, not bothering to backtrack when you don’t understand every single word or concept in a conversation perfectly — if you interrupt the flow, you’ll get that one discrete piece correct but lose the bigger picture.

Many times I’ve had the sense that I understood everything in the conversation up until 3-ish sentences ago, but have a much hazier picture of the most recent bit. If we just keep talking, that window will revise itself as the formerly most recent bit becomes clearer from context — so at the end of a conversation I’ll have more than the gist of it, but if you interrupt at any moment and ask exactly what we’re talking about I might be confused. This occasionally leaves room for comical misunderstandings but by and large is the most rapid way of learning I’ve found.

This is all by way of excusing myself for the fact that when Javier was driving me and Vanessa up the mountain to Glaciar Martial, where we were to hike around the ski area for a while, and he was explaining to us how we could return to the town of Ushuaia — either along the road we’re currently driving on, or a trail that starts alongside the road, and here’s where to find the trail, and here’s how long to budget for it, and here are some other useful things to know when hiking around the ski area — I didn’t understand the part about the trail being delineated with yellow trail markers, and I didn’t let it bother me that I didn’t understand it.

And this is all by way of excusing myself for the fact that on the way down, we easily found the trail next to the road, then, without knowing it, immediately lost it. We continued along a nicely cleared dirt road until it ended in a swamp, with foot tracks going ahead through the swamp and another well-trodden foot path to the right. Avoiding the swamp, we turned right, and headed downhill for about 50 yards where the trail abruptly petered out. Backtracking, we decided the trail through the swamp also looked pretty well trafficked, so off we went, but after half an hour we hadn’t made it very far, our feet were getting soaked, it was starting to rain, and this trail too was disappearing.

At some point during all this, Vanessa — who’s more competent at Spanish comprehension than I am, but also a lot more reluctant to admit it and act on it — said something about following the yellow brick road, which I took as an allusion to the fact that we were lost in Oz, but which was actually her wondering where to find the yellow trail markers — which she had actually understood in Javier’s instructions.

Eventually we gave up on the swamp trail, backtracked all the way to the paved road, and, about 5 feet from the paved road, found the extremely-obvious-in- retrospect yellow trail markers leading off at 90 degrees to the trail we’d been lost on. (In our defense, they were a lot easier to see in the return direction, and were hidden by the slope in the direction we were originally going.)

Anyway. Knowing just enough to be dangerous, indeed.

Turkey travel photos

Pictures from our trip to Turkey (October 2010)

Disclaimer: I’m no expert birdwatcher and have heretofore exhibited little interest in birding. However, staying for a couple days at the edge of Esteros del Ibará, a provincial park and wildlife sanctuary in northern Argentina, there were so many birds, and our hosts so eager about pointing them out, there was nothing for it but to go along and get excited about birds.

Here’s a list of what we saw in 2 days here (numbers correspond to the species listed in Aves de Argentina y Uruguay, or Birds of Argentina & Uruguay, gold edition).

74: Neotropic Cormorant (Biguá)

87: Great Egret (Garza Blanca)

93: Black-Crowned Night Heron (Garza Bruja)

96: Maguari Stork (Cigüeña Americana)

142: Brazilian Duck (Palo Cutirí)

218: Giant Wood-rail (Ipacaá)

246: Wattled Jacana (Jacana)

252: South American Stilt (Tero Real)

253: Southern Lapwing (Tero Común)

356: Monk Parakeet (Cotorra)

457: Amazon Kingfisher (Martín Pescador Mediano)

471: Field Flicker (Carpintero Campestre)

533: Rufous Hornero (Hornero)

691: Great Kiskadee (Benteveo Común)

696: Fork-Tailed Flycatcher (Tijereta)

801: Chalk-Browed Mockinbird (Calandria Grande)

867: Red-Crested Cardenal (Cardenal Común)

958: Screaming Cowbird (Tordo Pico Corto)

969: Scarlet-Headed Blackbird (Federal)

972: White-Browed Blackbird (Pecho Colorado)

Amazon often sells the same thing in a variety of editions — a book can be bound in hardcover or softcover or distributed purely electronically in Kindle format; a movie can be available on DVD or VHS or for download; all sorts of physical objects from MP3 players to backpacks come in a variety of colors — and since you’re ostensibly reviewing the essence of a product, not its format or color, they often combine reviews across edition/platform/color.

Sometimes this is useful; sometimes it’s harmful. In a book review, if I’m talking about how good the writing itself is, that applies to all editions of a book, but one format sometimes has specific flaws the others don’t.

(Especially for travel guidebooks you’ll see 1 or 2 star reviews from kindle users complaining about poor map quality. If you’re shopping for the paper copy; this won’t matter to you at all; if you’re shopping for the Kindle copy, this issue deserves to be brought to the forefront. In these cases the low reviews need to be glaringly obvious to kindle purchasers and not seen at all by paper purchasers; mixed together, they get the same visibility to everyone, which is to say, too little to the first group and too much to the second.)

For physical objects, for example camera backpacks, I’ve seen the problem more often in the opposite direction — an item offered in 3 colors might have 1 page with reviews and ordering information for all 3 colors, or might have 3 separate pages, fragmenting the reviews and leading to some really low sample sizes.

Update 2010/11/21: the Lonely Planet guidebook for Chile, which I bought for Kindle on 2010/10/21 and which prompted this post, is no longer available on amazon.com for Kindle, and the paper version how has at least 3 different editions for different years which are reviewed separately. I’m not sure why the Kindle one was taken down, but that’s an improvement in the treatment of the paper version. It looks like someone else noticed the problem the same time I did.

I’m not used to traveling by bus but I’ve been pleasantly surprised by Turkish buses.  They’re not that fast, but they are cheap, comfortable enough, leave on time, arrive on time, and go from everywhere to everywhere.  I arrived in Turkey planning our trip mostly around what’s possible by air travel but definitely shouldn’t discount the bus system.

Update: except when the attendants smoke — not a pleasant surprise.

From the “seemed like a good idea at the time” file: we’re taking a bus from Cappadocia to Ankara to catch an overnight bus to Istanbul to catch a flight to Lyon so we can take a train to Paris.  We could have just flown from Cappadocia to Paris…

I really like using the iPhone, but it’s not my actual daily-use phone any more when I’m home in the US; here’s why, roughly, I had to switch away from it. (I managed to unlock my old iPhone and still use it with prepaid SIM cards when traveling outside the US, like now, prompting these thoughts.)

It was immediately obvious when the first iPhone was release that Apple had changed the smartphone game — there had been plenty of previous attempts at a smartphone that had the same or more features, but the iPhone was the first that people really wanted to use.  Each successive model has been the gold standard for hardware features at the time it was released (though the competitive ecosystem quickly catches up), and each iOS release continues to be the gold standard for responsiveness and usability.

But all this comes at a price.  While I like using an iPhone, I don’t really want it to be the dominant phone platform; for the reason that Apple too tightly exerts control over it.  This burns both developers/partners and customers/users.  Partners: The way Apple runs the App Store has been well covered; their policies have improved over time but it’s not a free market, and you may still find yourself unable to publish a useful app there.  Users: Apple’s insistence on simplicity and one-size-fits-all means you get few choices.  I’m aware of the tyranny of choice, and maybe we don’t need as many choices as the ecosystem can give us, but I want certain choices Apple doesn’t give its iPhone customers.

What I really want, and have wanted since the iPhone 1 was released, is an iPhone with a keyboard on my choice of carrier.  What we all get is an iPhone with an onscreen keyboard on AT&T.

Keyboard… while the onscreen keyboard is adequate, maybe even pretty good, maybe you even like it, I’ve used phones with and without hardware keyboards and I know I want a real keyboard.  I can type faster, more accurately, while paying less than 100% attention to typing, and with less frustration.  We know that phones, and especially the iPhone, arouse emotions, so: every time the onscreen keyboard magically guesses what you mean as you mash across the keyboard quickly, missing lots of letters yet yielding completely correct words, I get a little tingle of satisfaction.  Yet every time the same autocorrect intelligence turns a correct, painstakingly typed word (perhaps the name of a friend or place, perhaps in another language) not in its dictionary into one that is, I feel a stab of anger that quickly outweighs the good.  And using correct punctuation (especially for parenthetical expressions) requires too many mode switches; easier done on any hardware keyboard.  All this is to say, to each his own; maybe you don’t care but I do; Apple seems likely to never offer this choice. (As of iOS 4, I believe that it should be possible to use external bluetooth keyboards, but who really wants to carry an external keyboard?)

AT&T… much has already been written on this too.  It’s a matter of speculation whether any other network could have handled the extreme load of all iPhone users; maybe yes, maybe no.  What’s clear is AT&T can’t.  The ironic thing here is that you pay, in the US, something like $300 for a brand new iPhone which you keep for 2 years or more, while paying something like $1000/year for the cell service from AT&T.  If you consider capitalism as the scoreboard, you’re paying 6x the price of the phone for the service, which should mean you value it 6x more.  Meanwhile, you can get more cell service (measured in minutes of voice, number of SMS, and bytes of data) from other carriers for less money, and in many areas, far more reliably.  I reached a decision that there was no way I could stomach paying AT&T $1000/year to intermittently deliver a service less reliable than their cheaper competition.  So. (And yes, that’s US-centric; iPhone users in other countries obviously aren’t saddled with AT&T. In my experience using an unlocked iPhone 3G in several foreign countries, it worked a lot better than AT&T in the US.)

Maybe soon we’ll see a choice of iPhone carriers in more countries, but the fact remains that I’m much better served by other phones, inferior in many ways, but which let me choose a keyboard and a carrier.  Thus, love/hate.

The Kindle brings a really unique proposition, one you maybe have to try before you believe in it (I didn’t get it at first, but I have to admit, the same was true of the early iPods).  I’d summarize it as follows: screen that reads like a book, battery life so long you can ignore it, immediate networked access from anywhere.

Of course it’s not perfect, or wasn’t at first — the screen is monochrome only and slow to refresh, the interface somewhat clunky, battery life isn’t truly infinite, and network access worked only in the US — but they’ve improved this, to the point that the screen refresh is fast enough, the interface is good enough, and it works worldwide.  (The 3rd generation Kindle has really nailed what Amazon set out to do, being an affordable, ubiquitously useful e-reader.  The first generation nailed the feature set at a high price; the second generation brought down the price, improved the most important part (screen readability and refresh rate) and eventually added worldwide whispernet; the third generation further improved the screen readability and refresh rate, adds the option of a builtin light, and includes a nearly ok web browser.)

Let me elaborate on the good bits somewhat.

The screen really does look like a book; it’s fully legible, indoors or outdoors, even in direct sunlight.  At worst it’s slightly glossy and might reflect a small amount of glare into your eyes, but no worse than a glossy magazine.

The battery life is like no other electronic device I’ve ever used, mostly because the screen draws no power except when changing.  This means that (unlike your phone, laptop or iPad), it’s not using power while you read a page — only when you turn the page.  With the wireless radio off, it lasts me several books, or several weeks.  If I leave the radio off, I can pretty much pretend it doesn’t need charging.  Now some laptops now have 12+ hour batteries, smartphones have batteries that last for days on standby and 6-10 hours of actual use, and the iPad probably gets something like 12 hours on a charge in typical use… all of this is impressive, and beats the heck out of laptops from a few years ago, but still, none of this compares to the Kindle.

Worldwide free whispernet (network access over the cell network, automatically configured and paid by Amazon) is another one of these things that you have to try to really appreciate.  The promise is basically twofold: you can shop for new books at Amazon’s store (covering a wide range of options from impulse buying new books, re-downloading books you’ve purchased before, and automatically delivering subscriptions, but really these are all cases of connecting directly to Amazon to get stuff you pay extra for), and, somewhat more surprisingly, browsing the real web.  Prior to the Kindle 3, the bundled web browser was so bad it almost seemed like they didn’t want you to use it, but the WebKit-based browser in Kindle 3 gives this the lie.  And again, the fact this is free and requires no additional configuration, worldwide, is pretty amazing, especially if you travel internationally.  (If you travel internationally and want access to the internet while away from a Wi-Fi hotspot, your options are basically: activate a worldwide roaming plan on your home-country smartphone and pay through the nose for roaming, or buy a local SIM and pay for data; usually this is cheaper but it’s a hassle, especially if you don’t speak the local language.)  True, the browser still isn’t perfect, and double-true, a lot of web content doesn’t work very well on a small monochrome screen with a clumsy pointing device.  Still: I’ve been able to make productive use of Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo! Mail and Gmail, Google News, and various other sites, for free, from rural Turkey, without jumping through SIM card hoops… I don’t know any other device that offers this at all, and the Kindle has it pretty much as an afterthought.

While I’m mostly talking about the Kindle hardware here, or Amazon’s initial vision (hardware, software, and content seamlessly combined), I’ll also note that Amazon has a free Kindle app — basically a software version of the Kindle — for pretty much any platform that matters (smartphone or tablet running iOS or Android, computer running Windows or Mac OS), so if you want to bring your own device and connectivity, you can get at your Kindle content… you’re not locked into the Kindle devices, if you don’t like the hardware or just don’t want to buy another device.

So, what’s not to like?  Really 2 things: needing to rebuy all your books, and shoddily rendered content.

On needing to rebuy all your books: OK, so music as files has pretty much replaced music as shiny discs, especially for listening; the iPod did to CDs what the Kindle wants to do to books; but how did this happen?  Remember Apple’s “rip, mix, burn” ads?  The early iPods were, like the Kindle, expensive yet sleek jukeboxes that could carry an entire library, which you could buy (a few dollars at a time, but a substantial library would quickly exceed the cost of the device) — but Apple (and the non-Apple competition) had a trick up their sleeve — the “rip” part.  You didn’t need to rebuy your whole library; you could easily convert your existing library, stuff it on your iPod or other MP3 player, and bingo, instant digital library.  For new purchases, you could buy as online files for convenience, or CD for flexibility and quality, and continue converting these CDs to the digital library format.  Concerns about piracy aside, the value of the portable music- playing hardware was clear (to music thieves and music buyers alike), and now there are quite a few viable stores for music in download-only form. Meanwhile, back to the Kindle, the analogy is clear, and the same possibility does not exist: you can’t move your existing library of books onto the Kindle; anything you want you have to buy again.  Moreover, for new purchaes, you have to choose between paper and digital, you can’t have it both ways.  I think this is a real downer for the overall value proposition, and part of why e-readers won’t be as mainstream as music players.  (Yeah yeah, and more people listen to music than read; that’s surely another part.)

But if you can’t convert your own paper books to Kindle format, what of the books and publications (which I’ll refer by the dislikable but standard term, “content”) that you can buy from Amazon?  It’s convenient, not that expensive, so just suck it up, right?  Well, this is where my main real beef with the Kindle ecosystem comes in… the paid content is just not that high quality.  You wouldn’t mind if it was cheap, but once you have to pay for it (especially, if you have to pay again for something you already own in another format), it’s psychologically really annoying when it’s not perfect.  And it’s not.  Typos and small formatting errors (spurious or missing line breaks) abound.  Dashes between words — like this — are often not set off by spaces —like this— which not only looks bad, but confuses the hyphenation algorithm, leading to even more ugly white spaces.

What it boils down to is this: you’d think it would be the easiest thing in the world for Amazon to get pristine digital copies of whatever manuscripts they can license, in the most up-to-date edition available (more on this in a minute), convert it to their format, hey, maybe even pay someone to proofread it once more, and that’s what you get. But it looks to me like they’re manually scanning and OCR’ing paper books (just like you’d have to if you set up your own paper->ebook version of the “rip” from the music world), introducing additional errors, not proofreading them, selling you buggy content, and not fixing it up later, either.  This is really disappointing.

What’s really disappointing about this is that it misses out on one of the biggest promises of the format… the books are just data, and Amazon has the infrastructure in place to manage and distribute and redistribute this data. So, unlike a paper book which you try to get right the first time, but which can’t be changed after printing (short of reprinting the whole thing), an ebook could morph over time.  Think of how wikis, such as wikipedia, can improve over time, especially with moderation (so there’s no vandalism, and the only changes are for the better); this is what I see as the unfulfilled promise of Kindle content.  I’d be somewhat happy if I could just fix the errors myself on my own device so they wouldn’t be eyesores (the Kindle has always had features for annotating content, so why not let me edit it too?). I’d be even happier if my edits were reflected back to Amazon so they could fix the errors in the source version, and the next person to download the same book gets a better edition.  I’d be happiest if this was all automatic, and any typo would be fixed in the source the first time someone fixed it anywhere, and all downloaded versions would be updated automatically as soon as the source version changed — this is all within the realm of possibility. Crowdsource the editing — just as with the good webmail providers only a few people ever need to see a given spam message and mark it as spam and then nobody else at that provider ever sees that spam, only a few people ever need to see a given typo or formatting error in Kindle content and then it’s fixed for everyone.

(As an aside, in addition to stuff I’ve bought from Amazon, I also use my Kindle to read some books from Project Gutenberg, which I download and convert using Calibre.  This content is, as a rule, even worse, in terms of typos and ugly formatting.  Still, I have the ability to fix it, for myself or even contributing the changes back to Project Gutenberg for future editions.  The pipeline is clunky, both for initial download + conversion, and for changing and submitting changes back, but it’s possible; Amazon’s closed ecosystem could make this seamless.)

A special mention here for subscription content, which is even more expensive than books, and (in my limited sampling) even buggier — I continue to subscribe to a national magazine I like even though one Q&A section usually omits entire questions, making the next answer a complete non sequitur; I stopped subscribing to my local newspaper after noticing that most articles omit the byline which also should (and in the print and (free!) web edition, does) contain the place — this isn’t so bad for local news, but for regional news often rendered entire stories unreadable.  If I’m supposed to pay several dollars a month for something I can get free on the web, and the free version is to boot better formatted, this is not cool at all.

Oh, and don’t get me started on the keyboard.  Double (triple?) the size of the keyboard on a Blackberry or Treo, but the layout is nonintuitive, the keypress feel/feedback is mediocre, even after years of using it I still confuse the labels for delete and enter, and if I type faster than glacially it drops keystrokes.

While I continue to like the overall Kindle reading experience, and especially appreciate the ability to check Wikipedia, Facebook or my email for free from anywhere, I’m really frustrated about the buggy paid content — not fulfilling the cloud-managed crowdsourced-typo-fixing possibility is especially frustrating to my optimizing engineer personality.  Thus, love/hate.

Germany travel photos (Oktoberfest in Munich)

Pictures from our trip to Munich for Oktoberfest, meeting up with Adam, Susannah and Jeff.