My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This was a Christmas gift this year from my mom. For those who are wondering why I’d receive a book seemingly outside my usual interests, that’s probably because you’re unaware that I participated a lot in theater up through high school. In 11th grade I played “Baby John” in Breck‘s production of West Side Story, which was a ton of fun. Parts of the musical are thus pretty ingrained, even almost 15 years later.

As is typical for my non-fiction reads, what I enjoyed the most was the trivia. In this case I was interested in all of the artistic choices that went into the musical, especially when they got into the differences between the original Broadway production and the film version, including some pretty significant differences in song ordering.

One of the interesting and surprising historical anecdotes was that Jerome Robbins was called to testify before HUAC, and named names, thus chilling his relationship with his co-creators. It’s striking how pervasive the fear of Communism was at the time.

I think the author was stretching things a bit when trying to make broader cultural claims about the influence of the musical as a reflection of youth culture of the time, but I expect that sort of thing from art critics. I suppose to some extent it confirms that some aspect of the Romeo & Juliet story is pretty timeless, no matter the incarnation.

Overall, it made me a bit nostalgic, missing my participation in theater, even though I doubt I ever had the chops to continue performing even as an amateur. If you are a fan of this musical, I would definitely recommend reading this book.

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I finished this third and final book on the plane down to Cancun a few weeks ago. I didn’t get a chance to review it on account of the travel and then the end of the semester. Up front: I liked it, although not quite as much as I enjoyed Catching Fire. All kinds of spoilery thoughts on this book and the series as a whole below the cut.

I clearly see why some people were disappointed with the ending. I just wish they hadn’t mentioned that opinion before I got to this book, as even that relatively spoiler-free bit of information colored my reading experience.

For one thing, as a huge fan of Neal Stephenson, I am well aware of how frustrating it is to run into a disappointing ending. I think that, generally speaking, wrapping up a story in a satisfying way is very difficult for writers, not just because it’s hard to say goodbye to their characters. To me there are three major approaches: write an ending that makes you happy, write an ending that makes the fan happy, and write an ending that makes sense in the context of the universe you’ve created. These are not necessarily mutually exclusive, but in this case, (2) and (3) ended up being incompatible.

Specifically, I believe fans wanted a “victory for the good guys” sort of ending, in which Katniss ended up with Gale, Prim lived, Snow was toppled, and a brave new world of warm fuzzy freedom was had by all in Panem. I claim that this would not have been compatible with the rest of the trilogy, given the fairly dark setting and large amount of personal and social tragedy present throughout.

I actually expected one (or possibly both) of Gale and Peeta to die, thus motivating Katniss to complete her story. That both lived, and that she chose Peeta, was a bit of a surprise, but also understandable given that Gale (indirectly) killed Prim. As for Katniss killing Coin, it was pretty clearly established in the beginning of the book that Coin in power would have been a return to the status quo before the first book, with perhaps a slightly different flavor of autocracy, so it was necessary for Katniss to be a “greater good” sort of hero.

I don’t know what Collins’ point was with the trilogy overall, in the grand scheme of dystopian fiction. Brave New World is one of my favorite books, and I’ve enjoyed others such as 1984 and The Giver. To hazard a guess, it would be something along the lines of “in war, there are no rules” and/or “killing someone changes everyone”. I hope that it will jumpstart the market for quality YA fiction again, as HP did a decade ago.

The concert, however, is not the focus of this tale. On our way home to Boston, on Route 9 about 20 minutes outside of Worcester, the Brake Warning Light came on in our Mazda 3, so we immediately pulled off the road into the parking lot of the Westborough McDonald’s to check the brakes and then call for assistance. Through a comedy of errors, we did not make it home until almost 4 hours later. Zipcar did a good job taking care of us in spite of a number of things outside of their control, and have compensated us for the inconvenience, but I do have a few suggestions that might help avoid big waits and a total of 19 incoming and outgoing phone calls. Details below the cut.

Before we even stopped, the first thing I did was to consult the car’s manual, which confirmed that this was a potentially very bad warning light. After we pulled off the road, we confirmed that the parking brake wasn’t stuck on, and decided that the correct course of action was to call for assistance instead of driving a car that could possibly lose its brakes at any moment. It’s entirely possible it was just a computer fault, but we didn’t think it was worth the risk. My dad also called (after seeing our tweets) to make sure that we had checked that the parking brake wasn’t stuck. That certainly would have made for a shorter evening had it been the case.

A call to Zipcar quickly got us connected with Zipcar’s Road Assistance service, and they set up a tow truck, set to arrive in 45 minutes. That sounded reasonable, especially considering where we were; a quick callback later confirmed that the truck would be able to fit both of us in the cab and take us all the way back to Cambridge. We popped inside to grab some fries and wait. The Zipcar rep also told us that they’d refund us the evening’s rental, since it had gone so wrong.

The tow truck seemed increasingly late, so we called back to make sure that they were somewhere nearby and on their way, but he didn’t show until almost two hours in. The tow driver got ready to pick up the car onto his flatbed, but as he lowered it, there was a rather terrible crunch noise. I was at first worried he had hit the car, but this turned out to be the sound of a temporary weld breaking somewhere in the supports for the truck’s flatbed. In the process the flatbed also punctured the right rear tire of the car, so we definitely weren’t driving it anywhere. The driver proceeded to hang around for almost 30 minutes while we called to arrange alternative transportation, I think hoping that somehow we’d pay him for his trouble, which was definitely not going to happen.

We quickly confirmed with Zipcar that they’d be willing to reimburse us for a taxi ride home, and that it was okay to leave the car. They emailed Andrle a form for that and we found a nearby cab company that was open and took credit cards, since the ride back to Cambridge would be ~$75. We then waited. And waited. And called the cab company, whose dispatcher seemed to be confused by either the address we had clearly given them or the landmark of “the McDonald’s in Westborough on Route 9″. A cab finally picked us up at around 12:30 and we headed home. After some navigation from the Allston MassPike exit, we finally got dropped off at around 1:40 am Saturday.

A long night, caused by pretty much everything possible going wrong. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a tow truck breaking before, but it sounded like maybe the driver’s manager was being lazy about permanent repairs. I felt a little bad for the driver wasting time and not getting paid, but at the same time, he accepted a job that he didn’t have the equipment to do. On top of that we had a lost, sleepy cabbie.

A few folks have commented that it’s likely that Zipcar cuts corners on maintenance, and that that is why we got a dud car. While that’s certainly possible, Andrle has been a Zipcar member and regular user for 5 years, and this is the first time she’s had serious trouble. I would think that if maintenance were consistently bad/delayed, we’d have had more problems with the cars. It’s also worth reiterating that while maintenance issues may have been the proximate cause, a lot of what happen was just bad timing.

I do have a few thoughts on how to improve the interaction in these non-accident emergency situations. First, the priority should be to get the driver and their passengers either a replacement Zipcar or transportation to their destination. Because of how far out of Boston we were, the former was understandably not an option. I get cost-wise why they’d rather us travel with the tow, since we were more or less going back in the same direction, but we could have left the car in a taxi a lot sooner (even with the cabbie getting lost finding us) . Had it been earlier in the day, we would have been willing to just get a ride to the nearest commuter rail station to get back into town.

There is also a problem with layers of indirection. We had to interact with Zipcar and Zipcar Roadside Assistance, who in turn worked with some auto club (which I discovered by accidentally calling back the wrong number), who called the tow company, who dispatched a driver. On the one hand, it was handled for us, but on the other hand, we had no idea how long we’d be waiting since we weren’t in direct contact with the tow company.

A third minor thing is that it would have been nice to use caller ID to immediately associate all of our calls into some kind of currently open ticket. That way we could have quickly jumped the queue as events developed and talked to the same rep we’d worked with, without waiting for follow-up calls

Even before this was totally resolved, we knew we’d remain Zipcar members – the annual costs for our moderate usage are well below the cost of owning even a cheap used car, and while our current apartment has a parking spot, there’s no guarantee of one at future locations. I don’t even want to think about how much it would have cost us to tow and repair our own car had this happened, not to mention having to stay with it until a second tow truck arrived.

Since Friday, Zipcar has refunded the cost of our trip, started processing our taxi fare reimbursement, and credited Andrle’s account with 25 dollars of free driving. I don’t know what the exact conversion of our lost time is, but this gesture, which wasn’t even promised, is really nice. I am somewhat curious what turned out to be wrong with the car, as well… on the other hand, I might not want to know if it would have been safe to continue driving home. Overall, a stressful and late evening, but I think Zipcar did right by us in resolving things as best they could as things went hilariously wrong.

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Finished this one a week ago. On a few levels, I liked this second book in the trilogy more than the first. In particular, the balance between world-building and action was better: I preferred the history over the combat. I would guess that is equivalent to my interest in the extended universes of, say, Middle-Earth. There were a few things that annoyed me, however.

I know that this trilogy is geared towards younger readers, and I’m fine with how it’s a relatively easy read – but I don’t like being treated like I’m stupid and have no memory. There are several points early in the book where Katniss reintroduces concepts that were clearly explained in the first book, as if we didn’t know what was going on. It annoys me when serial television does it (“Last time, on…”), and it’s worse when books do it. That’s the main reason this doesn’t get five stars – the story is great, but the writing feels just a tiny bit condescending.

Maybe this makes me a total snob, whining about too much accessibility. If anything, I should be celebrating yet another series that has triggered a spike in teens reading books that have interesting settings and characters. Maybe turning up the maturity dial would mess with it too much, and ruin some of its appeal. It’s likely I don’t relate to the characters as much as some readers, since I wasn’t an angsty teen, nor did I grow up in a dystopian future.

Speaking of dystopian futures, I like that Collins dove more into the political system in this book. I’d like to know more about how Panem came to be organized, who decides who lives in which districts, where President Snow’s powerbase is, that sort of thing. Perhaps Mockingjay will explore some of that.

So far it seems that if you start this trilogy, it’s worth reading all of them, because the plots are directly connected. I imagine it could be published in a single binding with 3 (or 9) Parts, similar to the way there are 6 “books” in some printings of The Lord of the Rings. On to Mockingjay…

Star Trek has been at various times credited with inspiring a number of modern gadgets, including the mobile phone (TOS communicator), the PDA and/or tablet (TNG PADD), and touch interfaces (TNG LCARS). The truth of that seems to be a form of loose inspiration (as is often the feedback between science fiction and technology). I’m going to focus in particular on the tablet iPad as compared to the PADD, because I think TNG missed on this in several key ways.

Depending on the specific “model”, a PADD might have:

• A stylus
• Separate touch/display areas
• Various sizes of bezel/case
• Different colors which indicate dedicated function

Steve Jobs famously said “If you see a stylus, they blew it.”, but a lot of these design choices come out of the realities of prop design – they needed to convey “futuristic” and “alien” in instant, simple, visual ways, and were not trying to build usable devices. Similarly, at the time of filming, they couldn’t embed live video into such a thin device, because the technology didn’t exist yet, so they either had backlit images or had to implement it in post-production with special effects.

Additionally, you’ll often see characters using PADDs in ways people don’t generally use iPads:

• Handing a PADD to another person to give them a document (various main characters)
• Having something “signed” by an officer (numerous nameless ensigns)
• Using multiple PADDs in a disorganized pile (Jake Sisko)

I think for the most part this is due to the writers not having any conception of an always-on network. This is pretty understandable, given that the Web didn’t arrive for non-academics until the middle of Deep Space Nine’s run, and widespread WiFi and mobile data weren’t around until almost the end of Enterprise’s run (EDGE was just getting started in 2003, and Enterprise was cancelled in 2005). The idea of something like iCloud, where the current state of all of your documents is nearly instantly available on all of your devices, was apparently too impossible for science fiction. They didn’t even seem to have a concept of email or file transfer!

Also, I think that for most adults both mobile phones and tablets are 1:1 devices – you are the only user of the device, and you have only one of them. There may be brief cases of lending, and there are certainly plenty of people who have separate work and personal phones, but I believe these are the exception. Children, of course, make heavy use of the devices of parental units until they are old enough to have their own. As such, you wouldn’t hand your device off to someone else indefinitely for their use – you’d transfer state digitally. You also wouldn’t keep different files on different devices. In this way PADDs were more like futuristic notebooks or clipboards, not computers.

I’ve been using an iPad for almost two years, and even though I never got around to reviewing it, my uses have definitely differed from my predictions. I even named mine “PADD” (partially in keeping with my theme of naming Macs after Star Trek animals). I checked out the Retina Display today at an Apple Store – it really is astounding, in some ways more so that the iPhone 4/4S. In spite of all of the improvements, especially the screen, I don’t feel the need to upgrade from my original 16 GB Wi-Fi iPad to “the new iPad“. However, if mine turns out to be unable to support iOS 6, that would be a significant motivation for me to shift.

I like to joke about how using it means I’m living in the future, even a Star Trek future, but in many ways, what we have is better than what Star Trek imagined. I believe that Captain Picard would have been much happier annotating treaties, reading Shakespeare, and writing condolence letters for dead security officers… on an iPad.

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book has been out for a while, and has been on my list for some time, based both on the general buzz and direct recommendations, not to mention that dystopian near-future young adult sci-fi is right up my alley. I got the boxed set as a Christmas gift, and I started reading after finishing up some non-fiction that I was in the middle of tackling.

A non-trivial motivation was, of course, the upcoming film; I strongly prefer to read the book before seeing the movie, so that my imagination can run a bit more freely than whatever vision the filmmakers may have. I do very much enjoy what the director and various designers manage to do in bringing words to life (the Lord of the Rings films, for example), but the written word gives me the ability to see things in my own way. I was thinking about this more recently in the context of Yahtzee’s recent blog post on movie adaptations of video games. In this case that’s a little broken by having seen some of the trailers already, and having an awareness of the casting, but I think I was able to keep that out of my mind while reading. Collins is pretty good at describing the visuals of a scene, through Katniss’ eyes.

Overall, this was a good, exciting read, and because it is so action-heavy, especially in the second half, well-suited to its film adaptation. I was a little worried that the first-person narration by Katniss would annoy me, but I think the dystopian setting managed to mute whatever teenage angst might otherwise have dominated.

Another aspect of its YA target audience is that it was an extremely fast read for me – I was getting close to 3 PPM, and read the whole thing in just 3 sessions. On the other hand, that confirms that it’s a good read, and tough to put down once the plot gets going. I have a tendency to devour books in this way, especially fiction that I find immersive.

I was also glad that the plot wasn’t too predictable, particularly with regards to who would live and who would die, while still touching on the expected tropes. Obviously the availability of a trilogy implies certain things about the survival of certain characters, but that’s nigh impossible to avoid.

I would recommend to anyone of any age with a slight sci-fi bent that they pick up this trilogy and dive in. I am definitely looking forward to the movie, which opens next weekend. My librarian friends are as well.

I am not arguing that a filmmaker isn’t allowed to modify their work after the fact, creating new versions and refining their masterpieces; nor am I claiming that almost every draft and notecard should be made public, as the Tolkien estate has chosen to do. In this context, I mean that a culturally relevant work, one that changed sci-fi filmmaking and spawned a huge (one might say galactic) fictional universe that is still generating new content in all sorts of media, was not saved. They had that additional responsibility: preserving the original version in a form that would continue to be accessible to future generations. Lucas himself used to agree.

Where George failed utterly, another science fictional universe even more dear to me than his films has succeeded beyond my best hopes. I write, of course, of the recently announced project to remaster all of Star Trek: The Next Generation into high definition. What’s exciting about this is that they went back to the original film negatives, which Paramount has apparently been storing in a salt mine somewhere. I’m also glad someone decided to record the show on film and not NTSC television cameras, making this project possible. The one disappointment is the schedule – it sounds like they’re planning to release two to three seasons a year.

A few weeks ago, Emery hosted a viewing of Star Trek: The Next Generation – The Next Level, a Blu-ray disc featuring a sample of three remastered NextGen episodes: the pilot “Encounter at Farpoint”, plus “Sins of the Father” and “The Inner Light”, which are among my favorite episodes. The first establishes Q as a nemesis (and bookend) for the entire series, the second really kicks off the “modern” Klingon storyline, which gets touched on even more in DS9, and the third is probably the most emotionally powerful episode of the series, and a real demonstration of Patrick Stewart’s acting ability. Overall, good choices to demonstrate what the HD conversion process entails, and how much is being preserved.

The thing that’s really striking is that the conversion to HD really highlights the work of all of the artists who aren’t on camera – the set designers, the matte painters, the model builders. You can see the slight color variations in the Enterprise-D’s duranium hull plating, the texture of every wall panel, the tiny buildings in the distance on Qo’noS, the fact that the post-atomic horror officer’s inhaler reads “ARMY” in a futuristic font. The key thing, however, is that most of these increases in detail are just capturing what was already there, not adding gewgaws where there were none, as Lucas has done. Apparently there are a few places where visual effects were completely replaced, but it’s generally pretty subtle, since they tried very hard to preserve the original look.

The one downside is what we already knew about HD – sometimes it is unkind to actors and sets. You can now see askew hairs, more wrinkles, faint stains in the carpet on the bridge, and the like. However, in my mind, these slight jars from immersion are far outweighed by the visual “wow” of the improvement in detail. I did notice one brief clip from a scene in Farpoint that was clearly just upsampled; presumably for whatever reason that section of film was too damaged to be restored, so they had to go back to the SD video. Hopefully the occurrence of those is rare.

Even though I already own all of TNG on DVD (a bulk purchase made several years ago, and totally justified by number of viewings), I’m excited by this huge effort to preserve this key segment of geek culture for future viewers. I can’t wait to see how the rest of it turns out, and I do plan to eventually rewatch it all in order in HD. Suffice it to say that their initial pass is amazing, and I hope it sets an example for other shows and movies.

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Bought this with an old gift card at the Harvard Coop last week. I’ve long enjoyed Neil deGrasse Tyson’s hosting of NOVA scienceNOW (a show I DVR), as well as his various guest appearances on The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, and I had followed the news coverage of Pluto’s demotion by the IAU in 2006.

This book is a nice overview of Pluto’s discovery and eventual reclassification (as the subtitle indicates), written in Neil’s whimsical style. There are some funny photographs of various astrophysicists, and good coverage of the cultural impact of Pluto’s demotion, such as various editorial cartoons and handwritten letters from elementary schoolchildren. I’m glad the appendices included song lyrics (including one by JoCo!) and the full text of various documents regarding Pluto.

My only complaint about the book is that I would have liked a little more detail, both in the history and the science, but of course it’s intended to be accessible to a general audience, a task at which it succeeds.

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I checked this one out from the library at work. It’s a basic collection of science anecdotes, mostly from the Enlightenment period up through WWII. The author is a British marine biologist, so most of the scientists mentioned are British, and the modern-day stories in particular naturally focus on the author’s mostly British contemporaries in the marine sciences.

One fairly clear agenda that the author has is wanting to recognize various scientists who made major “home front” contributions during WWI and especially WWII, often risking their lives to develop all sorts of non-weapon technologies necessary for the war effort, such as bomb disposal and submarine escape hatches. Many of them were Quaker conscientious objectors, and received no medals or official recognition of some of the dangerous experiments they performed on themselves to save lives on the battlefield.

There are a number of gross-out moments, mostly related to the symptoms of various terrible things either self-inflicted or applied to the public due to bad science.

I suspect there are fewer post-war anecdotes thanks largely to the standardization of experimental procedures with regards to informed consent and other protections for test subjects. Overall interesting, but not engrossing (as evidenced by it sitting on my shelf half-read for a few months).

Looking at my recent blog history, you’ll find that it has been rather book-centric. This is largely a function of a quick book review being easier to write than a longer, more personal post; however, it belies how much of my time I actually spend reading books. I sometimes bemoan the fact that I read less than I used to, but I think I can chalk that behavior up to three factors:

• I read a lot more in high school
• I still get to read more than most people
• I now read more content online

The first point is part of growing up, and the second point is part of a larger sociological question that I’m not qualified to address, so I’ll focus on the third point: how and where do I find and read short- and long-form content on the web? The list probably won’t be too surprising (Twitter, Facebook, blogs, news sites, etc.), but I’ll go into more detail on what clients I use to keep track of everything. It should not be surprising that my acquisition of an iPad in April of 2010 significantly changed how I interact with text online.

This has been a topic kicking around my head for close to a year, since I spend a lot of time connected, although some of my reading/archiving methods have changed over time. The most recent inspiration to write this up was a discussion I had with my mom back in October about how to save articles that she finds online, the way one might clip an article from a physical newspaper. Another one was this post from Brett Nordquist in May of last year about personal online recommendations, in which we happen to use a lot of the same sources/services.

Below the cut, my rather verbose recommendations on how to quickly filter a wide variety of text content online for eventual reading.

Definitions

Before I dive in, some quick definitions. This is how I organize things. It’s probably also why my posts get so long… but I think it would be useful to make the distinction between a few categories of things, although in some cases there are overlaps, or things that fit multiple categories.

• Channel – A place where I can read content from multiple individual sources – Twitter, Google News, etc.
• Source – An individual content producer – friend, blog team, news site, etc.
• Service – A tool that makes it easier to read and share items from channels and sources – Google Reader, Pinboard, etc.
• Client – An app that makes it easier to interact with one of the above – Twitterrific, Instapaper, etc.
• Device – The hardware on which a client runs – iPad, Mac, etc.

Channels

One of the important features of how I define a channel is that it has a style. That style both encompasses the typical length of content, as well as the general type of content (mostly text, or more image and video) and who it comes from (friends and family, other individuals, or other groups). That matters because when I decide to view a particular channel might be based on what mood I’m in. I also handle channels differently – some I manage more carefully, keeping track of read/unread, and others I don’t mind if I “missed” something. To some extent that behavior varies based on the capabilities of the service/client I use for a given channel, and whether or not the channel is also used for communication, not just content discovery.

You’ll note a lot of Google “products” in this list, probably because they offer the advantages of single sign-on and tend to have relatively minimalist interfaces and unobtrusive advertisements.

Google News

I access this as a site in my browser, and I haven’t customized it much. I’ve removed the Sports and Entertainment sections, and added a custom one for Mali. This is where I go for general news, and some neutral political coverage, but I don’t tend to dig very deep since there’s not much focus, and on most topics that I care about I have better sources via other channels. However the headlines alone are a good way to remain generally aware of what’s going on in the world, and thus might spark discussions on other channels.

Facebook

Facebook for me consists primarily of personal updates from friends and family, so it generally doesn’t generate a lot of content to read, although I have a couple of friends who primarily share links here. A lot of the sharing tends towards images and video more than text. That said, Facebook’s comments architecture, combined with mobile notifications, means it’s often easier to have follow-up discussions on articles. Additionally for many of my friends and family, Facebook is the best way for me to keep on life updates that I might not otherwise hear about.

Twitter

I tweet. A lot. I don’t know where I fall on the distribution, but my general sense is that I’m on the high end. I follow a wide variety of people, some friends or people I’ve met, some who are strangers. Because tweets are short, a lot of the reading is just getting quick thoughts or links, and sometimes it’s not obvious from someone’s brief description whether a link will be interesting. Twitter tends to be where I get more specific technical or geeky content, since I follow mostly technical and geeky people. I also have a close group of friends for whom Twitter is the place we go to trade a lot of sass and humor. It’s worth noting that Twitter was one of the ways my wife and I got to know eachother better when we were first dating.

Google Reader

I use Google Reader as my feed reader, so for me it’s effectively the RSS channel even though it’s a particular service. I subscribe to many feeds, most of which update only rarely, and a few of which might update dozens of times a day but for which I ignore most individual posts. A big part of my morning or evening routine is skimming the unread list and quickly ignoring articles that don’t look interesting to me. I didn’t ever use any of its social features (which at various points were absorbed by Buzz and more recently Google+), so I wasn’t upset by their disappearance. I generally try to keep the unread count at or near zero, but sometimes that involves a bit of cheating using Instapaper, which I’ll get into more below. For the most part I don’t follow links from blog posts, unless I want more context, or unless it’s a blog that tends to be in a link + commentary format.

Guild Forums

This channel is very specific to me, but it’s one of the ways I keep in touch with my World of Warcraft community, even though I don’t play much anymore. I also maintain contacts with guild members via Facebook and instant messaging. This tends to be where I find out about video game news, as well as hearing about a lot of viral internet memes.

Instant Message

This is predominantly random personal conversation on a wide variety of topics, but for longer discussions on politics or other current events it beats the other channels. Those discussions in turn require some linked content for context, which I usually read immediately to continue the conversation. Perhaps unsurprisingly, by “instant message” I really mean Jabber, with my Google Talk account.

Email

Not a whole lot comes this way anymore, but my mom will occasionally send me news articles. There was a time where most of my internet memes came by way of the various SWIL alumni mailing lists, but the activity on those  has fallen off a lot in the Facebook era.

I think that’s most of them. There are exceptions, but for the most part I use each of these in one form or another most days.

Sources

I’m obviously not going to enumerate and describe every Twitter user I follow, every blog I read, or every website I visit, but I wanted to highlight a couple of high-quality, high-volume sources that probably influence me more than others. I’ve grouped them somewhat by topic, and then in some cases again by related groups of people.

Science & Technology

This is my primary interest in news, so the vast majority of non-friend Twitter feeds I follow are in this area, as well as a lot of the blogs I skim or read. Even when the topic is some tech I don’t actively work with, I like staying up to date on what’s out there. I’ll break this up into subtopics a bit, since this covers so much.

Apple

I follow the feeds of the major rumors sites, such as AppleInsider and MacRumors. Even though their accuracy is low, it’s fun to speculate. I mostly focus though on Daring Fireball by John Gruber and the blog of Marco Arment, founder of Instapaper. You could call them the 5by5 guys, since along with John Siracusa they’re members of the same podcast network that I listen to regularly. They all discuss more general tech issues, although the focus is mostly Apple. My introduction to them was probably originally through Siracusa’s infamously epic OS X reviews.

Tech

Probably the most prolific source is the relatively new site The Verge, to which I was introduced by the aforementioned Gruber. They cover a lot of stuff I can skip easily (like CES), but with enough interesting articles worked in. Unfortunately their RSS feed isn’t full text, but their site design is clean enough (with citations!) that I don’t mind.

Science

One of the more amusing sources of science news are the Twitter accounts for various probes and rovers, such as Spirit and Opportunity, and Curiosity. As far as general news sites, I find that the BBC’s science reporting is superior. In some cases, Wikipedia has near-current information about new discoveries.

Politics

Especially during campaign season, I’m pretty hooked on election coverage, as well as finding out the latest insane bile being spewed in Obama’s direction. My biggest source is Andrew Sullivan’s The Dish, which fits my socially liberal/economically moderate leanings well, although he takes some positions I don’t agree with and can be stubborn at times. He has a lot of other content I skip over, but he filters a lot of other political blogs so I don’t have to. The other top one would be 538, whose statistical analysis can’t be beat. (Note: NYT doesn’t allow a full feed, but someone cooked up a Yahoo! Pipes version of 538.)

Another good resource for following up on various political coverage (which I also sometimes get by watching The Daily Show and The Colbert Report) is PolitiFact, which grades politicians’ statements. These are unsurprisingly often false.

Entertainment

There is a lot of amusing stuff on the intertrons, but as far as longer form reading goes, few can beat the dry humor of McSweeney’s. In a totally different (and eclectic, probably not-safe-for-work direction) there’s the blog of Jamie Zawinski, aka jwz, of early Netscape fame; he naturally has a lot of tech-related snark as well. I read a few web comics still, such as xkcd, Penny Arcade, and Scenes From a Multiverse, but they don’t exactly fit the reading discussion (although they all have associated commentary).

To some extent, I wish I had kept track of when I started following each of these sources, and how or from whom I found out about them. It would be an interesting trend to plot, especially as I get close to source saturation and have to start either ignoring sources or filtering more.

Services

So, how do I read, save, and share all of this content from so many different sources? To some extent this process is deeply integrated with the channels listed above, but there are two standout services that I’ve already alluded to: Instapaper and Pinboard. The former is a way for me to quickly move an article from one of my channels to a medium-term store, which is especially useful when I’m mobile but don’t have time to read; the latter is a way for me to organize links for sharing as well as my own reference.

Instapaper

I’ll talk more about the Instapaper client itself in the next section, but as far as the service is concerned, the primary use for me is that it lets me timeshift my reading. This is especially useful with the client, which can download and store the text of articles for offline reading, which I like to do when I’m on an airplane.

Secondarily, it serves as a low-pass filter on the flow of what I’m reading. That is, by moving articles from Google Reader or Twitter feeds to Instapaper, and then not coming back to them for a few days, I might have a different sense of their relevance to me, and I can decide to simply delete them without reading them.  In recent months I’ve gotten pretty behind in my Instapaper queue, but that just means that I’m more aggressive in ignoring articles that I once thought might be interesting.

Finally, Instapaper is a pretty good track of what I’ve read online in total, since there aren’t a huge number of longer articles that I read that don’t pass through it. I would also add that my positive impression of the service is probably enhanced by the fact that I consume content produced by its creator, Marco Arment.

Unfortunately, Instapaper does not handle multi-page articles very well. Most of the time, if you aren’t able to enable some kind of single page or print view before saving an article to Instapaper, you only get the first page, and there’s no guarantee that when you go back later you’ll be able to access the original article (especially if you’re currently offline). This pageview-enhancing layout choice is increasingly common on news sites, desperate for ad impression cents. Additionally some pages don’t get parsed very well, or are actively trying to thwart services like Instapaper; I’m looking at you, New York Times. The end result then is that Instapaper is really just storing the link, and you have to read the content in its original form.

It would also be nifty if the service could cache PDFs or multimedia content, but I suspect that gets murkier from a copyright perspective, and stops being about “paper”.

Pinboard

A brief bit of history: Pinboard is for me a replacement for Delicious. I had been using Delicious since February of 2008, before it was sold by Yahoo!. I had never really used the “social” aspects of that service, such as subscribing to tags, except to see shared items from a small handful of friends. Fritz convinced me to join Pinboard in December of 2010, while the subscription fee was still quite low (under $3 as I recall). I was initially using it as an archive of my Delicious feed, using the Delicious interface to save and tag links, and having Pinboard store a copy of all of them. My migration to Pinboard happened in May 2011, after Yahoo! announced at the end of April that they were selling Delicious to AVOS. I finally shut down my Delicious account (deleting all bookmarks, which were now duplicated on Pinboard) a few months ago.

Once again, I don’t really use any of the social aspects, except to subscribe to the feeds of a few friends (and share similarly). In some cases I end up seeing links that they’ve shared elsewhere. I understand from the official blog that the creator of Pinboard, while creating a simpler service than Delicious, has gone to great lengths to accommodate the fanfiction community that has fled from there.

So, for me, the main purpose of a bookmarking site is to comment on an archive links for my own future reference. It might be to indicate that I read something interesting; or it might be something that I would want to reshare with someone after an initial posting has faded from memory. It also gives me some flexibility in deciding when and on which channel to share something, since I can pop back to my history to grab some past link (with tags and notes to remind me what’s what). On occasion I go back to a document for my own reference, and the pinned page is easier to find that just googling it.

I also use Pinboard to archive all of my tweets. Unfortunately it can’t go back in time in the Twitter archive to grab tweets from before I used Pinboard, and sometimes there’s a delay, but as far as searching my own tweets goes, it’s vastly superior to Twitter’s interface.

Another reason I like both of these services was their very forthright and honest handling of a major disruption in service they experienced in June 2011 due to an overly broad FBI raid on the hosting provider where they both happened to have servers located.

I should briefly mention that I used to use Readability, contributing a few bucks a month to help support publishers. I really liked the idea of paying a little bit for content online. However, since I never used the text conversion aspect of their service (relying on Instapaper), and I was cutting back on extraneous online expenses, I decided to close my account. In addition I felt that if I was contributing real money for each pageview (as far as I know, a dollar or so is significantly more than most advertisement rates online), I shouldn’t have to deal with the obnoxious stuff most sites do to make money, including multipage articles, ads, and tracking.

If I’m feeling feisty, I’d like to play around with the Instapaper and Pinboard APIs to generate some nice graphs of my usage over time. That would I think make for an interesting follow-up post. I suspect that it tends to be spikier than my actual reading habits, since I don’t always save or pin everything I read, or immediately after I read it.

Clients

A big part of using these services the way I do is dependent on the quality of their interfaces, which is either a web application or a native client. In my experience the native clients are simpler and cleaner, but for full functionality you need to use the service’s website. This distinction is blurred a bit by the availability of APIs that allow various channels and services to expose some of their functionality to other clients, allowing for tighter integration, where you might not need a dedicated client because it’s just a function of another client.

I’ll cover channel clients first, and then service clients (although there’s just the one). For anything mentioned in a previous section that’s not discussed below, you can just assume I use the website, although I will briefly talk about bookmarklets since to some extent that counts as API integration with the browser as a client.

Facebook 

The official Facebook app for iPhone and iPad is pretty notoriously bad. Even after the recent update that improved things like photo viewing, I get all sorts of weird UI rendering errors. I pretty much just use these for viewing push notifications, and occasionally to update my status while I’m mobile. Another annoyance is that you can’t turn off Facebook chat (or hide your buddy list) in the iPad app.

Twitterrific 

My client of choice has changed a lot of the four years or so that I’ve been active on Twitter, and only very rarely do I use the actual Twitter website (especially as it’s changed over the years to grow more and more complex). My favorite by far has been Twitterrific, by The Iconfactory (I think I used one of their free icon packs back in the OS 9 days). The interface is clean, and the use of contextual menus (well, action sheets, but you know what I mean) makes it very easy to read and share.

There are two features they’ve added fairly recently that are useful to me and relevant to this discussion: Instapaper integration (I can send any tweeted link to Instapaper instead of viewing it), and support for Tweet Marker, which makes jumping between my iPhone and iPad much nicer now. They also have improved handling of Twitter’s stupid t.co automatic link shortening, as far as getting back to the original link is concerned.

At home I mostly use my iPad for web surfing, email, Twitter, etc.; the times when I’m at a desktop at home or work, I use the Chrome extension Silver Bird (formerly Chromed Bird). The interface isn’t pretty, but it works, and has desktop notifications. I’ll probably grab Twitterrific from the Mac App Store to replace this at some point, especially if I spend more time on my Mac this semester.

Now a quick review of past clients, and why I moved on from them. When I first started tweeting, I actually used the instant message interface for a while, because I liked the notifications, and I already had IM clients installed everywhere. On my original iPhone, before the App Store existed, I used a web interface called Hahlo that at the time was better optimized for Mobile Safari. My first desktop client of choice was Spaz, also an AIR app. If you view my Twitter stats, you can see that I used TweetDeck a lot, and for a long time, before they were bought by Twitter proper; this was mostly due to their cross-platform nature, and before I realized how terrible Adobe AIR is. I also used the TweetDeck iPhone app for a long while (after moving on from the Twitter mobile site), but it was pretty unstable and had a crappy UI. I never used the official Twitter app (née  Tweetie). My TweetDeck usage also coincided with my most prolific period of tweeting, and my highest involvement with the social media community in Boston.

Reeder 

This iPad app is my preferred method for accessing Google Reader. It’s one of those interfaces that “gets out of the way”, and the integrated (and configurable!) sharing menu makes it much easier to pass RSS feed items from this channel to one of the other channels/services. It’s very easy to quickly skim through posts, either reading them then and there, ignoring them, quickly sending them to Instapaper for later consumption, or tagging them for saving to Pinboard.

The only major downside to reading RSS feeds on the iPad is the totally inconsistent way videos are embedded. I think this is mostly the fault of the original author (or their CMS). Sometimes they play using HTML5 <video> in Reeder; other times the video only works by viewing the original post; and, of course, some videos/players either disable embedding or don’t have a non-Flash version, although that’s decreasingly common. I sometimes get crashes in this app, but it’s mostly either associated with video playback, or when I’m viewing a linked site in a WebKit view; both are presumably due to memory limitations on my iPad 1.

I do use the web interface for Google Reader, if I’m at my desktop. The recent redesign didn’t bother me at all, since I never used any of the sharing features that got replaced by Google+; it took just a little while to get used to. I think if I used a desktop Mac more often, I’d probably consider the full version of Reeder. I pretty rarely have reason to look at the mobile interface on my phone, which is why I didn’t buy the iPhone version of Reeder. (This is one of my biggest complaints to iOS developers – I’d rather pay more for a universal binary I don’t fully use than to have to deal with multiple versions.)

Instapaper 

Suffice it to say I wouldn’t be using Instapaper as a service if it weren’t for the app, whose killer feature is that it can cache your saved articles from Instapaper on your device for reading offline. There’s not much more to say; this is a great, wonderfully designed app, and it works very well. I predominantly use the iPad version; the few times I’ve used the iPhone version has mostly been at the gym. There are a few tasks that are better managed on the website, but not many.

When I am offline, and I want to mark an article as read but I intend to post it on Pinboard later, I move it to a local folder called “Pinboard”, which I then go through, tagging articles. I haven’t played around much with the font options, but you get a lot of control over the presentation of the text. Like Reeder, there are a lot of sharing options built in, so if I’m reading a saved article I might tweet it directly from in the app.

This is not relevant to the client per se, but when I’m reading articles that I found via Google News, or were otherwise loaded in my browser, I often use the Instapaper bookmarklet to save extracted text. I don’t use any of the Instapaper “long reading” feeds, but it is to a large extent the client and service through which most of my text consumption flows.

My client usage has shifted over time, and which clients I continue using depends in large part on how well they’re kept up-to-date in terms of compatibility with services and usability on my current set of devices. At this point I think my current choices are going to be stable for a while, given that I’ve got a pretty good setup now for how they all work together.

Readflow

Most of the individual steps in my reading flow have been discussed in the preceding sections. I’ll summarize with this flowchart, which simplifies some of the options, but gives a general idea of how I process text as I read it (or ignore it).

I read sources from channels using services and then share via channels.

Conclusion

Conveniently, this post has at over 4500 words easily reached the length threshold that makes it perfect to use with a service like Instapaper! I didn’t do that intentionally from the outset, but I seem to have quite a few opinions on this perhaps overbroad topic. Hopefully this (or a portion of it) has been helpful in demonstrating one way to process a lot of mostly-text information from the web.