Will the Apple iPad make keyboards a thing of the past?

From the looks of Twitter, Facebook and Google trends, the Apple press conference, including the release of the iPad, is the only thing going on in the world today. Google news says something about a Toyota recall and Holocaust Remembrance Day, but it’s pretty clear that everyone in the world is interested in the Apple tablet computer, and only the Apple tablet computer.

How has Apple managed to suck everyone in? For some reason people have been looking forward to the release of the iPad for months. It appears to me that the Apple iPad tablet computer is just a really big iPhone. Am I way off about this? Is everyone going to run out, get a small loan, and buy one?

The price to pay

Prices for the Apple iPad range between $499 and $829 depending on features. So the low-end model still costs a bit more than a netbook. I am having a hard time picturing people using the iPad. I can see why it would be nice for watching videos and such, but to use it as a phone? Awkward.

I have heard a lot of musings about how it can be used in education and other good things like that. However, I am still having a hard time understanding what it has that computers don’t already have. And it’s a bit big to be carrying it around everywhere. It won’t fit in most purses.

Sellability

As New Jersey Business News put it, “Apple would have to show why consumers ought to pay for yet another Internet-connected screen, on top of the TVs, computers and smart phones they already have.”

Do you think Apple will be able to do it? If you had an Apple iPad, what would you use it for? According to NJ.com, tablet computers have already been around for a decade, but they haven’t been successful. Only time will tell if Apple has discovered the magic formula for selling tablet computers.

Years back in the mists of the computer age, I came across, or someone told me about Yahoo, then the latest buzzword in hi-tech, whatever that meant then as well. I investigated Yahoo and discovered that I could design my own home page on my computer, meaning that every time I switched the computer on, my own page with its personal and private information would be there containing everything that I wanted to see. So I went to work on it.

My homepage

It has my small stock portfolio which is supposed to update automatically every 10 minutes but has been stuck for the past 6 months. It has the latest world headlines, saving me from visiting the newspapers. It has the weather in case I don’t know if I’m blowing hot or cold and lets me check the weather in any city in the world; it has the lotto results which I don’t need because I never win, something on the latest books and the movies, and so on.

The horoscope

At the time I put my homepage together, Yahoo offered a link to a Horoscope site and I thought why not? I added it and have almost never looked at it since. When it comes to things like horoscopes, I prefer to take a Payday Loan and go to the bookstore and buy the most reliable reference book I can find on the subject. It is usually the most expensive one as well.

Pisces (2/19-3/20)

Yesterday, for some unknown reason, I read my horoscope on my homepage. Yes, I know what all you guys are yelling – there is a reason! Here’s what I read:

“Add some personal touches to any and all writing you do today otherwise, your creative writing skills are in danger of rusting away! Even a little flourish to your signature on that check to the phone company says something about you. Don’t wait until you are asked to write a novel or wedding speech. You have to try to integrate your creativity in absolutely everything you do, including emails and form letters.”

That’s it.

Questions

First of all, how does this horoscope – or its writer – know that I write?

Second question, why did ‘it’ pick that day? Isn’t today’s writing also in danger of ‘rusting away’?

I hope you know what you are doing with all these messages you are sending me, I depend on my creative ability in many ways, and here you are saying that if I don’t this or that everything may fall apart. Thanks you for your advice. I assure you that I work very hard on ‘integrating my creativity’ into absolutely everything I do, including emails and form letters. I hope I’m getting better at it all the time.

I was thrown

I have to admit that the short horoscope threw me in many ways. It came as a surprise and as a shock. It did a great job on me and I immediately deleted 3 articles that I thought were not up to my personal level of satisfaction.

The home page

Now, how do I inject a little creativity into my home page and get things, mainly the stock exchange, moving again?

I have an address and all sorts of people write to me every day. Most of them are greeted by my butler, Spam-killer, and others run into a blank wall when they try and enter. Only the good guys make it all the way through.

Surfing the web

The mail is the easy part of being up here. It’s what I do that’s complicated. I write articles on various subjects, so I am continually zooming in and out of Google, looking up some fact, then dashing across to see what’s happening in the rest of the world, back to take in the stock exchange prices, then a look at something in a dictionary, I attend to some question from a construction site that I am mildly connected to and back to my article. I do all this without ever closing a file or moving out of a website. When I need something new I simply open the browser again and go to another website.

Only the heavy breathing of the computer or some sly message about me reaching the limits of my memory slows me down and on those occasions it’s easier to take a quick Payday Loan, dash across the street and buy more memory.

Disaster strikes

All was well this morning. At about 11, I went to the kitchen to get a cup of coffee, returned, picked up the mouse – no internet. Dead. Not a whisper, not a sign of life. I am reasonably technical minded, so I pulled out all the wires lying on the desk, plugged them back in, no change. Then I rebooted my computer, a major operation because it means exiting from all the sites I was in; no change.

I thought about calling my Internet provider and then I remembered what happened the last time I resorted to this – I sat in on hold for about 3 hours and finally the person who came on line and who sounded as though he was ten years old, said he was in Singapore and he couldn’t help me.

Plan B

Plan B is always the New York Times crossword and Monday is an easy day. I was back at the computer an hour later – still nothing. I went through all the technical operations again to no avail. I cannot believe that I am totally dependent on the internet. My whole life revolves around it and is directly connected to it.

The internet is very sophisticated

Thanks to the internet I no longer have to go to the bank to run my fingers through my money or shield my eyes from my overdraft. A few days ago I received a new internet surprise. My wife went for her annual blood tests. A few hours later I receive a text message on my cell phone telling me that results were being posted on the HMO’s site on the internet and sure enough, there they were.

There is now very little that one cannot do on the internet and for the work-at-home gang, it certainly makes life every easy.

But it’s shock and disaster when it goes dead in your hands!

Top guns in the computer security world are watching warily as the dreaded Conficker worm strengthened its hold on already-infected machines with the arrival of the April 1st trigger date. As expected and moving round the earth with the sun, the malicious software evolved from East to West, greeting April Fool’s Day with a malicious snarl.

Mr. Confick?

This sounds like the plot in a Superman movie where one evil man, Mr. Confick, takes on the entire world by himself. Said one security consultant, “What’s the man behind Conficker going to do? When he has this many machines under his control it’s pretty scary. With a click of a mouse he could get thousands of machines to do whatever he wants.” Conficker was first detected in November 2008 and has been silently infecting computers ever since.

I know what I’m going to do: I’m getting a Payday Cash Advance Loan and I’m off to the computer store to buy a back-up thingy, whatever it’s called. From now on, you can ask me for anything that I’ve written and I’ll find it. I will be fully backed up.

Here comes Microsoft

“Supermike”, the Microsoft taskforce, is working day and night to stamp out the worm and has placed a bounty of $250,000 on the heads of those responsible for the threat. What is frightening to a computer user like me is that the worm is apparently programmed and can do various things on its own. On Wednesday the worm became harder to stop, when the computers it had already infected got messages sent by websites with Greenwich Mean Time and others based on local clocks. It then began checking in to its evil headquarters and obeying instructions. All you had to do to ‘turn it on’ was to open a website like the NY Times. Your computer read the clock on their website, went into a hypnotic trance and now will do everything that the evil Mr. Confick tells it to.

The infection rate has slowed lately, but computers that are not updated with a software patch released by Microsoft remain vulnerable, according to security specialists.

What’s he going to do?

At the moment Mr. C. is not doing anything. He is probably sitting and watching his tame worms crawling around the Western world as we are. As someone put it, “But there is a loaded pistol looming large out there even if no one has pulled the trigger yet.”

Have you got it?

One of the ways you can tell if your machine is infected is that the worm will block efforts to connect to websites of security firms such as Trend Micro or Symantec where there are online tools for removing the virus. If you have it, remove it at once by any means at your disposal!

Beware

And as Supermike comes flying through cyberspace to destroy the evil Mr. Confick’s army of worms, cyber-criminals are gearing up to take advantage of Conficker’s hype by using promises of information or cures to lure Internet users to websites that are booby-trapped with malicious software.

Beware the worm!

A payday loan will get me out of this pickle. Here’s how I got into it… I went to an unusual funeral yesterday. My old schoolmate, Sid, bought it when he skidded off the N55 and hit a tree at about 90 miles an hour. Sid was always a little wild and was never a great driver. We met at elementary school and were firm friends throughout our lives, the last five years lunching together every Tuesday at Steve’s Sandwich Shop on Maple Street. It was quite painful for me to watch Sid’s departure after more than sixty years of active friendship.

Sid, the amateur computer buff

Sid’s funeral was different. His wife of forty-eight years, Clara, is a strong-willed and determined woman and she made a decision an hour after she received the news of her husband’s death. She asked the Funeral Director to lengthen Sid’s grave by about 18 inches, not that Sid was extra tall, but she wanted to bury Sid’s computer with him.

“Sid was always fiddling with his computer, adding programs and memory and games, deleting stuff, undoing the screws at the back and messing with all those chips and wires and thingies inside. I am sure no one else can use the computer after all the changes he made to it, so I decided it should go with its master. And perhaps it will be of some consolation to poor Sidney, wherever he is!” she added, a tear rolling down her cheek. “I will ask our son Tony to apply for a payday loan and we will buy a new computer for the house, one that Sid has not modified and that will always work when we switch it on.”

We bury Sid

We stood around the grave and watched as the coffin bearing Sid was laid in its final resting place. Silently the cemetery workers then placed the keyboard, screen and disk drive, each clad in a see-through plastic dust cover, in place at the head of the grave. Prayers were read, a few short eulogies were delivered and we were about to file away from the graveside when Clara clutched my arm.

My cell phone goes with Sid

“Pete, do you have your cell phone on you?” I passed it over. “Thank you,” she said. “I will bury this with Sid too. The email may be problematic and a phone is more reliable. Perhaps he will want to make contact with me.” She tossed my phone into the hole and smiled at me. “Poor Sydney!” she sobbed.

No more emails from Sid?

I have to say that I would be surprised to receive e-mails or phone calls from Sid in the future, but who really knows?

I won’t take it with me

You understand now why I need a new cell phone. I hate the things. They keep you tied to the leash as it were; they ring at the most inconvenient times and the battery is always flat when you need to make an urgent call. I would love to return to the pre-mobile phone era of freedom and silence. But what can I do?  I’ve learned I can’t live without one.  How soon can I get that payday loan to buy a new cell phone?