Twelve Black Code Monkeys

I’ve heard of the Slashdot effect. I’m not sure if it still exists, but I remember a coworker of mine mentioning this way back maybe 5 years ago. Apparently people who were mentioned on Slashdot.org with a link to their site often experienced the effect of tens or hundreds of thousands of Slashdot readers clicking on that link and subsequently crashing their server!

Perhaps this isn’t quite the same, but after Joel from the always excellent and witty Gizmodo.com posted a link to my comparison of the Treo 600 with the Color Sidekick this morning, I’ve at latest count gotten over 1800 hits! Holy Cow! Before this I’d gotten less than 13,000 hits in the lifetime of this blog – over a year! So far, in probably less than 6 hours I’ve gotten the equivalent of what I would normally get in almost 2 months of blogging! I’ve looked at the logs and still so far most of the links are coming directly from Gizmodo, but it also looks like a few people are posting links to it elsewhere – like on their own blogs, which theoretically could accelerate things, at least for today, I’m sure over the next few days things will ramp down rather quickly, but it is interesting seeing how the traffic evolves and modulates over time…

Well, it appears Wil Wheaton’s birthday is the day before mine, although he’s also four years younger. I will be turning 36 on Friday, and while I haven’t really enjoyed getting older since turning 25 or so, now that I have a wife and a house and more of a life, well, I at least don’t feel like my life is “running out.” Sure, no kids yet, but that will come eventually.

Wil also seems to do some mobile blogging. Since buying my Treo 600 from my friend Rich I have started looking into various applications, getting one to work ok, but it seemed pretty basic. I couldn’t see how to embed links, although I think you could imbed images.

Alas other things have preocuppied my time lately to where I had to put that aside for the moment. For one, me and my wife are going to NC next week to do some sightseeing as well as participate in a digital photography course that will hopefully get me really moving with my new D70 (although they use Fuji S2’s for the classes). So I’ve been doing lots of reading and also trying to get this new GPS system working efficiently that uses my Treo (I’ll try to write about this in a future entry). Oh yes, and there are all the bills and other paperwork that have been piling up for months while we tried to unpack and get the house into some kind of shape. I still want to take a month off and just catch up with all this stuff, but somehow I don’t think my boss will let me do this, even though it is my birtday in a couple of days!

Me and my wife were at the mall this weekend and stopped by the Apple Store as she needed a case for the iPod Mini that I had bought for her in April but which didn’t actually arrive until last week! While there I saw the the new 4G iPods and wouldn’t you know it, I somehow convinced myself I should get one! So now my old 3G 30GB iPod is up on eBay as well as a 256MB SD card.

I first used eBay back in probably 1998, after my sister told me about it. My first experience was not the greatest. I sold my VCR to some guy in Texas who sent me a check. I didn’t send the VCR right away, but kept waiting and looking at my bank account. Finally, after a few days, the amount was added to my account, so I went ahead and sent it out. Several days after that, or maybe a week, I got a notice from my bank that the check had bounced and my account had been charged $5. So I email the guy who is initially nice and says to redeposit it as he was in the process of moving and getting a different account but had put money back in. Reluctantly I redeposited it and got the same result. So at this point I asked for a money order for the original amount plus the $10 additional he owed for the bank charges. I didn’t hear from him for a couple of weeks, so sent another letter, then another, getting increasingly less friendly, although I never resorted to threats, name-calling, or anything like that. The only threat I made was that I would have to give him a negative rating and contact eBay’s fraud department if he didn’t respond. Finally after a month or so he did respond, saying he’d been out of the country. Furthermore, he said, it was “my fault” because I was the one who sent the VCR before the money was actually cleared. Nevertheless, he told me, he still intended to send the money. I waited a few more weeks and never got anything despite his claims to have sent payment. Finally, I went ahead and gave him a negative, and then he returned the favor, so this is my only negative on eBay. This guy isn’t even a registered user of eBay, at least not under his old account. I kept my eBay account intact despite this, but it took me a while to venture back after this first bad experience.

Most of what I’ve done on eBay is selling. I actually found a place in the town I now live that was selling used DVD’s as well as some highly-discounted new ones for very cheap - $5-$15. You can now get these prices at any large retailer, but back then it wasn’t as easy. I probably sold a couple hundred of these over the course of a couple of years before finally deciding it was too much work for the effort. My average take after shipping charges, eBay’s fees, etc., came to about $5 per DVD. That might not sound bad, but when you are selling an average of 3 or 4 a week, that’s only $15 or $20 for what amounts to a couple of hours of work if you included driving to the post office a couple of times and mailing the things, spending a half hour looking through used DVD’s at the store, posting the auctions and emailing with the customers, etc. Not much better than minimum wage, and after a while not a whole lot of fun!

I still use eBay on occasion to sell things, but generally have not used it to buy a lot, at least nothing big. Part of the reason is because you are taking more of a risk. You’re often not dealing with a real business that you can call up the BBB or the local news. Getting one’s money back is generally a very difficult task unless you use third party escrow services, which I suppose I would demand if I were buying something more expensive than a few hundred dollars.

I did have a couple of instances on eBay where I got way more than expected. There were a couple of guys who decided to bid up the price of a used DVD I bought for $10 to a whopping $41! You could go online and buy this same DVD for $25! At least back in the late 90’s when this was all pretty new, people would get carried away and decided they had to have some item that they had thought they won because they had been the winning bidder for several days. This of course doesn’t work with more expensive items as the people who are bidding are probably not doing it as a “whim” – I tried unsuccessfully a few times to sell my mom’s baby grand piano. A number of people actually came to her house to look at it. The problem with a piano, though, is that the moving cost can be prohibitive! So despite it’s being worth $3,000 or so, the highest bid we got for it I believe was around $1,500.

I occasionally get spam that talks about creating businesses to sell stuff on eBay, but this just reminds me of my pseudo business with the used DVD’s. Somehow selling stuff online is just not all that interesting! I’m sure there are pleanty of folks that can make a decent living selling all kinds of things online, but to me it just seems like a whole lot of detail and you’re not actually using your mind in a creative way or actually helping people in any significant way – other than getting them some gadget or toy or something that they want.

One of my earliest memories, although I may be mixing a few together, is of me and my mom taking a walk early in the morning in Kismet on Fire Island. I must have been only four or five. We end up having breakfast on the rooftop dining area of this restaurant in town where we can look out amongst a see of bungalow rooftops that are glowing in the morning sun. I remember my mom saying to me that we were early risers and that my dad and sister were not, and I took pride in that.

My father died when I was just nine years old, but my mom is still an early riser and my sister still prefers to get up late, although a new baby has put an end to any “preferences” for sleeping schedule, or I should say, any but the new baby’s. Somewhere along the line I was converted to the dark side and now it is a lot easier for me to get up late than early.

I really love the morning, there’s something really magical about that time of day between dawn and the time when the sun gets to bright to look at for more than a second. At least on sunny days, that is. But even if it isn’t sunny, the world just seems more fresh, real, even innocent. The early mornings are before the mad rush hours start, before the events of the day can start weighing you down, although with news coming from around the world, when it’s morning here, it’s well into the day in other areas that could be experiencing yet more bad news.

My problem, if you can call it that, is that I get involved in something at night, like writing a blog entry, reading discussion forums, watching a long movie, etc. and before I know it, it’s quite late. Maybe part of this is that at that late time my sleep-addled brain is working more slowly and so I just don’t notice the time go by. Whatever the reason, I always end up getting to bed really late, and so getting up really early is, if not impossible, at least painful.

I think a lot of this also has to do with the job you hold that controls most of our schedules. I’ve been lucky enough to have jobs where one’s daily schedule was not exactly written in stone. No time cards, no real tracking, and a great flexibility in terms of when one could get in. Coworkers in the past and present have gotten in as early as 7am and as late as noon, sometimes even later. Perhaps this has to do with the field in which I work being IT and web development and that coders normally keep somewhat unusual hours unless they work in a company that organizes lots of meetings attended by non-coders who work more regular hours. So, what this has resulted in, is that “routines” are hard to come by. When you have great flexibility, you, or at least I, tend to use that flexibility and come in later one day if I happen to have been up really late, or perhaps early if I wake up by chance and can’t fall back to sleep.

The only thing that has changed this to some extent for me is getting married, or I should say, moving in with my now wife. Although her job is not exactly strict when it comes to time either, at least in theory she has a time that she is supposed to be in by. If not for both that and the fact that I’ve either been driving her to work or to the metro stop for the past couple of years, I probably would be coming in at 10:30 or later every morning as I had been before I moved in with her.

Lately, though, I’ve been trying to get up a lot earlier. My rational that I tell myself is that if I can get up early and get to work early, I can also leave work early and get home with enough time to get a lot done before dinner, after which my motivation level to do much of anything other than sit in front of the computer or TV goes down dramatically! I should, I tell myself, be able to fall asleep a lot earlier, because I will be more tired from getting up so early! But sitting in front of the computer or TV does not take all that much energy, and so you have to rely on external stimuli to tell you when it’s time to go to sleep, not just whether you are feeling tired. I’ve had mixed results so far. I’ve been able to get up an hour or an hour and a half earlier than usual, but I’ve been getting to sleep at the most an hour earlier, but often only 30 minutes or less. So I’m just getting less sleep, which is no good either! I guess the real challenge will be to keep this up on the weekend when I don’t have to go to work. I just am afraid that sleeping several hours later on the weekend will just make it that much harder to readjust all over again every Monday.

Well, a new generation of iPods has just been announced. Looks like they are not the revolutionary changes that some people were hoping for, including color screens, support for playing video files, larger storage capacity, greatly decreased size, etc. They are, instead, an evolutionary development with a very slightly decreased form factor, consolidation of controls, longer battery time, multiple on-the-go playlists, and ability to speed up or slow down audio books without changing the pitch of the narrator’s voice. Oh yes, they are also cheaper by $100! All in all, I think these set of improvements are very nice, especially considering the lower price.

Back in April, I took advantage of a $100 off deal from Audible.com* and ordered an iPod Mini from Amazon.com. Almost four months later, I still have yet to receive it. Amazon has yet to ship it. My shipping estimate has changed twice, and the latest one is set to start in four days and go till August 6th. I have little confidence that even this date range will be met. With the introduction of the new iPods at lower prices, I wonder if the Minis will be decreased. My sense is they won’t be because there is such a great demand compared to supply that they could probably increase the price without harming sales! The new iPods are apparently now on sale in Apple stores, although I haven’t actually been by one to confirm this. So far they aren’t listed on Amazon. If the Minis continue to be delayed and it looks like Amazon will actually have stock to ship the new iPods without having to wait 6 months, then I think the price differential of $50 between a 4GB Mini and a 20GB G4 iPod is enough to make me ditch the Mini altogether. It was actually supposed to be a birthday present for my wife (her Birthday is in April) and she’s waited way too long as it is. Somehow I feel we should be compensated for all this waiting, but what can you do?

Oh yes, and when I first wrote about my iPod when I got it back in September of last year, I titled it “iPod, Therefore I am.” Newsweek has gone and stolen my tagline! Damn them! So the title of this entry (Newsweek please take note!) is copyrighted, trademarked, and otherwise owned my Twelve Black Code Monkeys. Any use of this title is strictly prohibited without the express major consent of Twelve Black Code Monkeys. Now play ball!

* Audible.com is a subscription-based audio book service where you can download books off the internet and play them on your computer or portable device. They don’t use open file formats like MP3 for fear of copying, but the proprietary file is more widely supported than you would think. I can play it on my PC, on my iPod, on my Treo 600, and if I ever got a Pocket PC or a Mac, I could play it on those as well. Because of the nature of spoken word, it can be compressed more with less quality loss than MP3. An hour’s worth of crystal-clear audio with no digital “artifacts” take up less than 15MB of space, whereas the standard 128Kbps bitrate MP3 file would take up over 60MB!

Wouldn’t you know it, just as I am starting to get a handle on my new Treo 600, my wife goes and buys me a new digital camera! Well, part of one anyway. It’s the Nikon D70, and I’ve been lusting after it for a while now! I’ve previously rambled on about my experiences with photography in general and digital in particular. This will be my fifth digital camera, which is hard to believe, since I got my first one only four years ago. I guess I’ve averaged a new one once a year! My last digital, the Canon S50, was bought with the hopes of pushing me to take more photographs, since it is a good deal smaller than the previous cameras I had and so more portable. I think it did help me take more, but not significantly more. I will probably hold onto the S50 as something that I can just throw in my pocket when I don’t want to lug a big camera bag and an expensive camera and lens. All my other digital cameras I ended up selling to friends in order to buy the next one, but this one, which is the most expensive one yet, I am getting without that benefit - although as I said my wife is helping me out.

I’m always amazed at my wife’s photographs, which she’s taken primarily on SLR’s – first a 35mm film Nikon F1, and more recently on a digital Fuji S2. Most of this is due to her skill at capturing things at the right moment, framing shots perfectly, and doing all the technical meatering stuff that I’m still too lazy to do. But also, part of it is the lenses she uses, which give her much wider leeway in terms of zooming and especially depth of field than are possible with the S50’s small lens.

In the last year or so there have been a lot more prosumer digicams coming on the market with longer lenses that have at least much more powerful optical zooms, but most of these are almost as expensive if not more so than the D70’s body (lenses of course can mutilply it’s price by leaps and bounds), and the lower priced ones simply don’t have half the control and functionality of the D70. When the Canon Rebel digital SLR came out last year and was the first digital SLR for under $1,000, I started salivating! Here was a camera within reach, at least theoretically, but an actual SLR. Reading the reviews, I was a bit disappointed. It seemed that Cannon had intentionally crippled the camera’s capabilities by simply turning off certain functionality that was available. This was done for marketing reasons as their higher-priced pro DSLR, the 10D, would have been outclassed at least in a lot of ways, and the 10D is a lot more expensive. Even some of the functionality that I’d had my small S50 would not be available on this SLR. So, I used that as a good excuse to not get too serious about looking to get one. Then the D70 came out this year, and according to the reviews it not only had many of the things that the Rebel lacked, but it was even superior to more expensive cameras in some ways – like in lag time. I decided that the D70 would be my next camera. I didn’t expect to get it by the summer, but figured that with some luck I’d have it by the end of the year. Well, as it turned out, the summer isn’t even halfway over and the D70 is in my hands, and while I’m very happy, I’m also a bit overwhelmed! It’s one thing if I could spend 30 hours a week playing with this thing, but with a new house, a full-time job, etc., I’ll be lucky to spend a quarter of that time playing with it!

Not only am I going from a compact prosumer digicam to a full-sized SLR, but I am also going from one brand, Canon, to another, Nikon. I’ve used Canons exclusively now for almost 3 years, so this is going to be as much of an adjustment as going to an SLR, since menu items are different, buttons are different, and of course the software is different. I’ve just started playing with the D70 and it feels so much more solid than any of the prosumer digicams I’ve had. It weighs more, of course, especially with a larger lens, and this just makes it feel less like a toy and more like a professional piece of equipment.

Other than the sheer size, the additional functionality, and all the different menus and buttons, I also have to deal with new software, or at least I may. For most of the time I’ve owned Canons, I’ve been using a program called Breezebrowser, which is highly regarded image management program built primarily for Canon digital cameras, although it does support other brands to a lesser extent. It has more features than Canon’s own software, particularly when it comes to RAW files. The canon S50 is a 5 megapixel camera and the Nikon is 6 megapixel, so one wouldn’t think the files would be that much bigger with a 1 megapixel jump, but they are. According to the D70, a 512MB compact flash card will only allow me to take about 47 pictures in its RAW format, while the S50 will give me twice that number! So I’m not sure whether to continue using RAW as I had been exclusively with the Canons. RAW is definitely the most flexible format, but if each raw file takes up over 10MB of space, I just don’t know if I can manage that on the storage devices at my disposal, and I don’t feel like laying out yet more money for gobs more storage or blank dvd’s to hold the results of each time I go out to shoot! So I may have to go back to Jpeg. Breezebrowser is a very nice program not just for converting but also for viewing, organizing, etc., and a companion product called Downloader Pro is the only one I’ve seen that allows you an incredible level of control over how images are downloaded and saved from a camera. I store my images in folders that coincide with when they were taken, so /2004/07/18/ would hold the files I took on July 18, 2004. Maybe not the best way of organizing, but I’ve gotten used to it. Nikon’s Picture Project, which comes with the D70, seems like a decent piece of software for making different sets of albums, allowing one to make different logical album categorizations without actually creating multiple copies of the images in those albums. Nikon Capture is a highly rated piece of software, but I’m not sure exactly its purpose yet. It only comes as a trial for the D70. Looks like it is maybe mostly for converting RAW images and editing images. I need to do some serious research and narrow down what the best software to use is so that I don’t have to go about learning half a dozen different packages!

Thom Hogan has an eBook about the D70 and I’ve ordered it because while the D70 manual is ok as far as digicam manuals go… it is a digicam manual! It gives you the basics, explains certain things that really don’t need explaining, and then shows you lots of LCD diagrams that make no visual sense. It doesn’t go into great detail on more advanced functionality either.

In any case, here are a few of the first pictures I’ve taken with the D70:

Many of you have read about my love-hate relationship with T-Mobile’s Sidekick and its lack Outlook synch capability. Almost a year ago I had gotten tired of waiting for the ability to synch my contacts, calendar, and task list with my Outlook data and tried out a Blackberry for a few days. Alas, although the Blackberry synched effortlessly with Outlook, it was missing other critical features, some of which could have been gotten at significant cost, but others not for any price. I went back to the Sidekick.

More recently, on the Sidekick Yahoo! Group that I started, someone who seemed to have some inside information suggested on the Sidekick said that in order to get Outlook synch on the Sidekick we would have to let T-Mobile know that we wanted it. Apparently such a capability was available and being offered by other carriers, but T-Mobile had yet to implement it for some reason which was unclear. Unfortunately, T-Mobile is the exclusive carrier of the Sidekick throughout most markets in the U.S., and so most people here could not simply take their Sidekicks to another carrier who would give them the features they wanted. Anyway, this user’s comments motivated me to create a petition to help garner more publicity for the lack of synch and hopefully to show how desirable a feature it was. While the petition itself did not get a whole lot of signatures (around 150 at last count), it did garner some press. More importantly T-Mobile finally came out with their first official statement regarding synch, and it held out no hope that they would ever offer it for the Sidekick!

Right around this time, a friend offered me his AT&T Treo 600 at a price I couldn’t refuse. Luckily one can find information about how to “unlock” the phone on the internet and soon I was using it with my T-Mobile account. I was able to try the Treo out a little before actually buying it, and after about a week, I finally decided to give up my Sidekick after over a year and a half with it in favor of the Treo. What follows is a in-depth comparison of the two devices focusing on the areas I find most crucial to a phone with internet capabilities. Obviously many people will not share my priorities and so my decision is only that - my decision. I’m not recommending or suggesting everyone opt for a Treo 600 over a Sidekick, but hopefully this comparison will provide you with enough useful comparitive information to make your own decision on which phone would be a better choice for you.

To summarize my main criteria, Outlook synch was of primary importance. All Palm devices, going back to the first ones from close to 10 years ago, have always had synch capability, and eventually Outlook synch once this Microsoft product gained some popularity. As noted, the Sidekick doesn’t synch nor does T-Mobile suggest it ever will. Secondly, there are literally thousands of applications for the Palm platform, with new ones popping up all the time. This open development environment promises to erase most of the limitations that the Treo has. The Sidekick has less than 20 applications that one can buy (or if savvy enough download), and this very closed development environment is suffocating. One of the central applications on these devices is the web browser. The Treo’s browser supports JavaScript, which many sites require in order to be viewed. The Sidekick’s browser does not support JavaScript. Finally, the reception on the Treo 600 is significantly superior to the Sidekick’s. Of course the Sidekick has some important things going for it over the Treo which I now miss, but, as I said, the tremendous amount of third-party software and services available can expand the Treo’s capabilities way beyond what it comes with out of the box. Some of these advantages to the Sidekick include a better keyboard, a larger screen, push email, better instant messaging, better multitasking, a great online no-brainer backup system, and overall a more elegant user interface.

History: The Sidekick came out first in October of 2002 in a monochrome model. In June of 2003 a color model was introduced which was basically the same except for the capability to take slightly better pictures via an external camera, slightly expanded memory capacity, and of course, a color screen. Also a tri-band model was introduced a bit later but this was sold mainly in European markets. Handspring has made various Treo models for years, and their latest incarnation, the Treo 600, came out in October of 2003. It was the first Treo to have a faster ARM processor and the latest OS5 PalmOS operating system software, which allows for more complex and faster applications.

Form Factor: the form factors of the two phones are not hugely different. The Sidekick is about a quarter inch thicker and longer, but the Treo is just a bit wider - that is if you align them to match. Also, the Sidekick kind of bulges in the middle, which makes it combursome for some people to use as a phone, although I never had an issue with this personally.

The Screen: the Sidekick’s screen is noticeably larger, as well as in a ‘landscape’ or wide-screen format as opposed to the Treo’s perfectly square screen. This aids in displaying some web pages which are already being cramped way more than what they were probably designed to handle. Also the Sidekick screen, being wider, can hold more pixels, and it does in fact - 240×160 as opposed to the Treo’s 160×160. Finally the Sidekick’s Screen can display 65 thousand colors as opposed to the Treo’s three thousand. I can’t say the color difference is very noticeable, but having red-green colorblindness, maybe I’m not the best judge! What I do know is the extra resolution of the Sidekick does make a difference in being able to have more readable text and better layout for web pages. The one advantage of the Treo’s screen is that it is touch sensitive, so you have a whole other set of inputs to get it to do what you want instead of relying on the navigational buttons or keys. The other nice part about the Treo’s screen is that it is very bright but also has a dimmed view which still gives off enough light to see it in a dark room. The Sidekick’s screen’s backlight is either on or off and even while on it is less bright than Treo’s dimmed mode, but still perfectly viewable.

Treo:
Sidekick:

Keyboard: the Sidekick’s keyboard is truly one of the best out there for a phone or PDA. It is comfortable, with enough space that I never hit a wrong key. It is a normal qwerty layout so those of us who are touch typists can get pretty quick with it. The Treo’s keyboard, while admirable for the small amount of space it occupies, simply is not big enough to handle extensive amounts of typing. Ok, maybe having it for a couple of weeks is not enough time to judge by, but I definitely have a lot more trouble with mistyping than with the Sidekick, and I have pretty small hands. Then again, I’ve read reviews of the Treo from people who claim to have big hands who find the keyboard just fine, so go figure! Part of the problem, I think, is that it requires more effort on the Treo to actually depress the keys than on the Sidekick. But also, there’s just less room to put keys, because of how the Treo is laid out – in a more vertical way whereas the Sidekick is horizontal. Because of this, the only characters you can get to come up on the Treo’s screen without having to do somehwhat awkward key combinations are the letters of the alphabet, a period, and a carriage return. On the other hand, there are a bunch of workarounds which make this situation much less of a negative than it would have been otherwise. First, there are a number of applications you can download that can aid in typing, including one called TextPlus that allows you to type coded shortcuts to produce longer words, programs that actually suggest whole words or phrases based on the few letters you start to type and then insert them on command, and another called KeyCaps600 that will let you hit a key twice in order to type the character you normally would have to use that more cumbersome two-key combination to produce. There are also numerous external keyboards you can buy that will work with the Treo and give you something approaching full-size keyboard for a PC (albeit in a small package perhaps a bit smaller than a laptop’s). Of course much of the software and all of the external keyboards will cost you, so take this into consideration.

Treo:
Sidekick:

Other buttons: the other buttons on the Sidekick include a scroll wheel and three buttons that select, exit, and go to the main menu/launch screen. Pressing these buttons in certain combinations will disable the keylock, or enable it, bring up a dialogue box to mute the Sidekick, and other basic functions. The scroll wheel is used like a cursor key or a mouse’s scroll wheel to move between different menu items, form fields, paging up and down, moving to different applications in the launch screen etc. The Treo equivalent to the scroll wheel is a “5-way navigator” which is a circle that you can press in 4 directions and a button in the middle for making selections. This works pretty well except that not all applications (third party ones anyway) support this button, and so in some case you will have to use an included stylus to tap on the touch screen or just tap it with your finger. The Treo also has for buttons that have always been part of palm devices. They are shortcuts to main applications like the phone, the calendar, etc. However, you can reassign them so that they go to whatever application you want. There’s also a button to turn wireless mode on and off, which is useful when your data connection has gotten hosed and you need to reset it. Another button lets you mute the phone with a click instead of having to do this via a software interface. And finally there are volume buttons to increase or decrease ring volume or talk volume. The volume, mute, and wireless on/off buttons are not available on the Sidekick.

Reception: for a phone, this is obviously one of if not the most critical aspect. If you don’t have reception you can neither talk, nor can you do anything on the internet. The Sidekick has gotten notoriously poor reception from the beginning - at least on T-Mobile. I can’t count the number of dropped calls I experienced, or how reception would be at four bars one moment, and zero the next, while sitting perfectly still on a park bench. Part of this is due, no doubt, to T-Mobile’s network quality, but not all of it, since other phones I owned and used with T-Mobile’s service did not have the same problems. In fact, the Treo does seem to get much better reception in the same places that I had very poor reception with the Sidekick. While it can still be flakey, going from zero bars to 4 and back in a few seconds, it tends to hold a better average signal and for longer. One example of this is that I not only have a phone signal, but a data signal 80% of the time at work with the Treo, whereas I was lucky if I could get a signal 20% of the time with the Sidekick. Of course people who spend all their time in a four-bar area will probably not care, but when you do venture out with a Sidekick, watch out! The other aspect of reception is how many “bands” your phone has, because this has an affect on where you can use it. Phones for Sprint and Verizon use a protocol called CDMA that is used mainly in the U.S., so if you get a Treo model from one of these companies than the number of bands you have aren’t really relevant. However, GSM phones (through T-Mobile, Cingular, and AT&T) can work in other parts of the world if they support the right bands (frequencies). The GSM Treos for these carriers are “quad-band” meaning they support all the GSM bands that are in use in most countries throughout the world, so if you want to use your phone outside of the U.S., you can do so fairly easily, although you may need to contact your carrier to arrange for it and you will definitely have to pay pretty high per-minute rates that don’t get to come out of your free minutes. The Sidekick that is available in the U.S. is only a single-band model that only works in North America. Unless you have managed to get your hands on a tri-band model, which I don’t believe is available in the U.S., your Sidekick will be useless throughout most of the world.

Build quality: I have no way of objectively measuring this, all I know is that I had to replace my monochrome Sidekick once and my color Sidekick twice. I know many who went through half a dozen replacements or even more. Of course you don’t hear a lot from people who haven’t had problems, that’s just the nature of complaints. I have heard rumblings from some that they had to get replacements for their Treo as well, but it doesn’t seem to be nearly as prevalent as the Sidekick. I haven’t had any problems with the Treo yet, and the one I have is getting close to six months old. The previous owner is not someone who treats his gadgets with kid gloves either.

User Interface: the user interface of the Sidekick is definitely one of its nicest benefits. Danger, the company that designed it, consists at least partially of Apple expatriates, and Apple has a reputation for great design. The Sidekick uses a program “launcher” that shows a semicircle of icons which rotate on and off the screen and into “focus” in the middle by a scroll wheel so that they can then be started by just pushing the scroll wheel like a button. All the programs run in a nicely multitasked environment. You can go into the web browser, choose a site to go to, then go read email or send some instant messages until you are notified that the browser has loaded your site at which point you can go back and view it while people continue to send instant messages, etc. You can get notified like this for new email, new instant messages, and new loaded web pages, no matter what application you are currently using. The Treo, on the other hand, was not built with this degree of multitasking, although you can duplicate some of this with some third party programs, just not out of the box, and it’s not as elegantly implemented. The Treo comes with the standard Palm launcher, but you can download many others which add more style and functionality. Do any of these equal or exceed the only one available for the Sidekick? That’s a matter of taste, of course, but I find the Sidekick’s launcher simple, elegent, and very slick. The launcher may not even be that critical depending on how you use the phone, since on the Treo you can assign shortcuts to any key on the keyboard. Want a shortcut to your web browser, just assign it to the ‘W’ key and then all you need to do is hold that key down for a few seconds and voila!

Built-in Applications:

Web Browser: the Sidekick’s web browser does a decent job at displaying web pages. This is partly due to a proxy server technology that Danger uses which shrinks images down and strips some incompatible code to make the pages come up faster and with few if any code problems. Unfortunately, the one big problem with the Sidekick’s browser is that it doesn’t support JavaScript, and believe me, there are quite a few sites that simply won’t work without JavaScript support. The Treo’s browser, called “Blazer” does support JavaScript, and so with it I can now get to my bank account information among other critical sites which I couldn’t with the Sidekick. Blazer out of the box doesn’t render pages as fast as the Sidekick, and many people, including myself, get a skewed view of its speed. But T-Mobile does offer a proxy server which does basically the same thing as that for the Sidekick, they just don’t advertize this very well. Once you set the proxy to this server, pages come up just as fast if not faster that the Sidekick. I just did a test with Yahoo!’s main page and it took the Sidekick 38 seconds to load and Blazer only 27!

Instant Messenger: the Sidekick’s instant messenger feature is an extremely accurate replica of AOL Instant Messenger, and AOL is the only messenger service it supports, although you can alternately set it to use AOL or ICQ (which is now owned by AOL), but not both at the same time. Again, there are applications in existence which will allow you to communicate with the other services, but T-Mobile does not offer these to their customers and who knows if they ever will. The Treo doesn’t come with any instant messenger software, but there are several you can download for an additional cost. Several of these can access multiple services simultaneously. The nice thing about one of these, Verichat, is that even if you don’t have a data connection via your phone, it provides a facility to keep you logged in and if someone sends you a message it will be forwarded to your treo via an SMS text message, which doesn’t require a true data signal to receive.

Email: The Sidekick is the only device outside of the Blackberry that I know of that offers push email out of the box. “Push” means that when someone sends you an email, the server actually goes out and finds your phone (like a telephone call) and “pushes” that email to your phone. Thus you generally get emails almost immediately after they are sent. The Treo does not have this capability and so it has to be either manually told to go and check for new email, or with some mail programs set up to go check on scheduled basis. The process of fetching this new mail can also take a while, depending on how you are doing it. There are some programs out there that get around this limitation to one degree or another. For example, with a program called “TreoHelper” you can set your email service to actually forward your email to your phone’s SMS email address and then each time you get an SMS (which does get sent out in a push method) it optionally will force your email program to go check for new mail. It’s not nearly as elegant as true push though. There are companies out there that do make a true push solution for the Treo, like Good Products, and its been rumored that Research in Motion, the makers of the Blackberry, are porting their software for use on the Palm platform. There are also different ways to retrieve email based on standard protocols like POP and IMAP. The Treo’s included mail application only does POP, but there are several third-party tools that let you do full IMAP synching, synching with exchange directly, and Lotus Notes as well. The Sidekick is a bit less streightforward. The Sidekick comes with its own email account which has its advantages and disadvantages. The advantage is that if one doesn’t have an email account, you get a free one, and if you have other accounts, you can pull alla of these into one central Sidekick account easily. The disadvantage is that you have to configure these various email accounts to get pulled into your Sidekick and that means POP, which means that your email on the Sidekick will not be in synch with the email on these other accounts. The Sidekick is supposed to support IMAP, but when I set this up with my IMAP host, it only retrieved the mail like POP, it did not actually synch things the way true IMAP would – deleting the files off the server as you delete them off your device, etc.

Personal Information Manager (PIM) softare – Calendar, Contacts, Tasks, etc.: These applications provide the core organizational/practical functionality for both corporate users but also those of us who have pretty busy lives outside of work and just need a good way to keep everything in your head. These utilities on the Sidekick, while functional, are somewhat basic and have some truly crippling limitations in certain cases.

Contacts: the Sidekick’s contact application lets you enter up to 2,000 contacts, which is enough for the vast majority of users, but I suppose for some users, especially salespeople, it would be a limiting factor. The Sidekick has distinctive ring capability, but you will only be able to use the ringtones that T-Mobile offers. You can’t import your own creations. You can also assign one of about a half dozen or so icons representing various kinds of people (a brunette woman, a dark-skinned man, etc.) to a given contact. I was able to assign a few of these before it became pointless. How distinctive can you get with a half dozen faces (most of which will only very vaguely represent the real person)? You can specify a note for a contact – my normal use for this would be directions to the person’s house – but unfortunately the note can only be 255 characters long, which is really not that much to work with. The Treo’s contacts application on the other hand lets you use as much memory as you want so you can have as many contacts or as large a notes field as you want within the constraints of your free memory. It allows you to assign not only distinctive rings to your contacts, but you can also assign a picture to as many as fifty “favorites.” These pictures can be imported via the camera, or from digital images you might have on your computer. While this doesn’t seem like it would be all that amazing of a feature, more of a bell or whistle, it is very helpful because your brain (or at least MY brain) can understand who is calling from an image in a fraction of the time that it takes me to read the actual name off the caller id. All you need is a glance and your phone can be halfway accross the room and you can still recognize the face of someone you know instantly. There’s even a third party application called LightWav that eliminates the built-in limitation and lets you assign pictures and even video clips to all of your contacts, even if you have 10,000 – given sufficient memory of course!

Calendar: the Sidekick’s calendar is your basic calendar and works pretty much as expected. Again, the notes field is limited to 255 characters, so it really can’t be used in a more advanced way – say to include meeting minutes within a meeting event, or to take notes so that you can later look up a meeting and read what was said. The Sidekick lets you assign icons to various events, but they are only viewable when you go to the event, not in a day, week, or month view of all events. Moreover, you have a very limited number of icons at your disposal, so you end up using ones (if you use them at all) that aren’t really only distantly related to the type of event. The Treo’s Calendar is also pretty basic, and doesn’t even include icons, but it does have more views than the Sidekick’s and has a different type of event called a “floating” event which combines a check-off field of a task with an event so that if it doesn’t get checked off manually on the day it’s scheduled for, it keeps showing up on subsequent days until checked. Also, the Treo doesn’t have the same text limits as the Sidekick and, as with all of these built-in applications, one can buy many third party applications that can expand them to an incredible degree.

Notes and Tasks: again, the basic theme here is that both devices have pretty basic functionality but the Sidekick has some crippling limitations on the size of the text fields, whereas the Treo doesn’t and can also be greatly expanded in functionality with the use of third-party applications, albeit usually at an added cost.

The Phone: a phone is a phone is a phone, right? Yes and no. For the most part, this is true. Both the Treo’s and the Sidekick’s phone interface have minor issues which are a little annoying but for the most part function as they should. Mainly the difference is with the reception, which as noted the Treo wins hands down. A couple of other items of note here include the fact that the Treo has a speaker phone while the Sidekick does not, although the Sidekick’s volume can get so loud that its easy to hear someone on the other end of the line even in fairly noisy environment – I mean not just if you’re the one talking on the Sidekick but if it’s your friend whose talking on it and you’re near him.

Third Party Applications: as I mentioned earlier, the Treo has thousands of third party applications. After all, the PalmOS operating system has been around for close to ten years! The development environment is very open and people are developing new applications for it all the time. Unfortunately, the Sidekick has a much more closed environment and hasn’t even been around for two years yet. There are developers creating applications for the Sidekick, but they can’t just publish these and let people download them because there is no way for the average Sidekick user to download an application onto their device without going through T-Mobile’s tight controls on what they decide they want to offer or not offer. The Sidekick has a system called the “Catalog” which presents applications (and ringtones) that T-Mobile has hand-picked to either sell, or in a few cases to give away. Although the Catalog has an easy interface so that all one has to do is navigate into it, pick an application and then choose “buy,” it also makes it impossible to try out an application before you buy it, something that’s almost universal in the Palm universe (as well as in the world of personal computers). If you do buy a program and then something goes wrong with your Sidekick and you have to get it replaced, you’ve also lost the application and have to buy a whole new copy of it! (* correction! Apparently I was mistaken about this, you can redownload the applications if something goes wrong and you will not be charged) There are currently all of 8 applications in the catalog and half of them are are games. Other than the games there is an SSH client, a calculator, an alarm clock and an application to retrieve AOL mail if you have an AOL account. On the other hand, if you have some technical abilities, you can actually sign up as a developer for the Sidekick and you will then be able to download third party applications to your device outside of T-Mobile’s tightly-held Catalog system. This, supposedly, voids your warranty, but no one has reported being refused a replacement when something goes wrong with a Sidekick that has been opened up to enable downloaded applications that aren’t in the Catalog. Nonetheless, the steps involved in modifying the Sidekick to do this and the actual process of downloading and installing these applications is by no means easy. Even when you do get it working, you find you still have only about 50 downloadable applications total, with a big chunk of these being games. No doubt some are very useful and expand the device greatly, but still no where near the amount that the Treo can be expanded without nearly as much effort. A few killer apps (for me anyway) that I now have access to on the Treo that I didn’t on the Sidekick include Audible Manager (for listening to my Audible.com audio books), Pocket Quicken, Pocket Tunes (listening to MP3’s), blogging tools which allow me to post blog entries (including pictures) with just the Treo, Quicksheet, which lets me view Excel files, and I am seriously looking at a mapping/GPS software and hardware.

Operating System/Architecture: the Treo uses Palm OS5.2, which is based on the popular Palm platform that’s been around for close to 10 years. It is stable for the most part, but certain applications can sometimes cause problems requiring resets. You can install new applications by simply transferring them onto the phone via a “hotsynch” which just transfers the files over a USB cable (or infrared or a modem or wifi). You can also tell it to transfer directly onto the external memory card if that’s available, allowing for extra room, however most applications can’t actually run off the card, but rather have to be transferred at least temporarily to the main memory or RAM of the Treo. The Sidekick runs a proprietary operating system that is Java-based. It is very stable and nearly impossible to crash. As noted, Tmobile has kept a tight reign on application development and very few applications have made it out to the general public, unlike the Palm platform’s thousands of titles. While the Sidekick cannot be expanded in this way, it does have some interesting advantages over the Treo in terms of data management. Basically, the phone works as a portable container of various kinds of data that it mirrors or synchs with Danger’s server. This client-server relationship has a third wheel – that of the “Desktop Interface” which is a web portal to the data. This enables one to view, add, change, and delete all of your data (contacts, events, tasks, notes, photos, and email) on a web browser connected to the internet. The advantage is if your phone has lost power or is out of signal range, or you left it at home by mistake, but can still get to the internet via some other method like a modem, or a terminal in a cyber cafe, or your office network, etc., you can immediately access all your data. This client server model also makes backing up irrelevant. You simply have a permanent copy of your data on Danger’s servers and even if your phone is lost, destroyed, or loses all power, the second you have a working Sidekick again and type in your username and password, all of your previous data as well as all your settings from web bookmarks to distinctive ringtones to shortcuts are all re-synched and its like nothing ever happened. The Treo, comparatively, is a pretty much stand-alone device. If something happens to it, you’ve lost your any data and program settings that you’ve added or changed since the last time you performed a hotsynch. There are utilities that do times backups either to your computer via hotsynch or to an external memory card, but most of these come at an additional cost.

Camera: the camera for the color Sidekick is fairly limited at 320×240 pixels, or a scant 1/12th of a megapixel. What’s more, there is some horrible distortion around the edges of the picture where the camera seems to lose focusing capability. Camera phones are generally not known for their quality, but the Sidekick’s is probably toward the bottom end. The camera is also external and so ads to the dimensions of the camera. It’s small enough that it can fit on a keyring, though, which provides added entertainment if you get into the habit of twirling it around your finger on the lanyard that comes with the Sidekick, as I used to do obsessively. The other limitation is that for the Sidekick you can only keep 36 pictures in memory total. You can save these onto your computer at any time in order to free up these slots for taking more, but it just doesn’t give you a lot of room before you have to “reload” so to speak. The camera is also an extra cost at $39.99. The Treo’s camera is built into the phone, and takes a much better picture than the Sidekick’s, mainly because of its higher resolution - about 1/3 of a megapixel (640×480). Some people actually have gotten some excellent results with the Treo’s camera, even when printed on 4×6 paper, but don’t expect anything close to what you would get from a dedicated digital camera. You have no exposure control, so things get blown out easily, especially on the Treo. The Sidekick’s camera can’t take anything in low light, while the Treo generally pushes the CCD sensitivity really high and that just results in more digital noise. With the Treo you can take as many pictures as memory allows, and you can offload them onto an external memory card which will give you considerably more capacity. One thing that will give you a quick boost is to decrease the jpeg compression of the Treo camera with a third-party program called Qset. The default compression is set to 65%, but setting it to 90% gives a considerably better picture while not increasing the file size significantly. Here are a couple of shots of the same scene:

The above was taken by the Sidekick and was only modified in Photoshop with Auto Levels.

This photo was taken by the Treo, then changed with Auto Levels in Photoshop, and then finally resized DOWN to be the same size as the Sidekick’s. As is expected, the picture looks clearer due to its higher resolution, however, it is also overexposed. There are supposedly ways to avoid overexposing and other limitations of the Treo’s Camera, but I haven’t learned how yet.

This photo is the from the Sidekick again, but this time it’s been blown up a bit to be a similar size to the Treo’s native resolution as seen in the photo below:

The clarity difference is a bit clearer in the larger images, as well as the Treo’s overexposure.

Battery Life: The Treo is rated to have a much better battery life than the Sidekick, but it’s hard for me to judge at this point. I try to keep it charged as much of the day as possible. The one advantage the Sidekick has in this department is that you don’t have to have the backlight on whenever you are using it. The Treo, at least as far as I’ve been able to tell, has to have at least a low-level backlight on when you are doing anything with it, even using it as a phone. Of course, you can shut it off, but then you can’t see the screen so can’t do anything, and you can’t shut it off while you’re on a call.

Accessories: many more third party manufacturers are out there making accessories for the Treo than for the Sidekick. There are a few cases for the Sidekick, the external camera, a wall charger and a car charger, but that’s about it as far as stuff made specifically for this device. Other than cases, chargers, and syncing cables for the Treo, you can find external keyboards, headphone adapaters that let you listen to music as well as carry on phone conversations with the same set of standard headphones (not hands-free type), there are devices that let you send the audio of the phone to a car stereo (or home stereo for that matter) via radio transmission. You can even hook up a GPS mouse to the Treo and have it serve as a navigator in your car.

Cost: this is one category which the Sidekick wins hands down. The Sidekick retails for $300 with a new service contract and currently has a $50 rebate if you buy it through T-Mobile’s website making it only $250. If you already are a customer of T-mobile you will probably pay $300 unless you have been with them long enough to qualify for a loyalty credit amounting to at most $75. Currently you can get the Sidekick from Amazon.com for just $69.99, including various rebates, but you have to be a new customer to T-Mobile to do this. In the past, these rebates have allowed for even lower prices on the Sidekick, but always with the caveat that you have to be a new subscriber. Current T-mobile customers will not be able to buy the Color Sidekick for under $225, unless you find it probably used or refurbished on eBay, Amazon Marketplace, etc. As I’ve said, applications for the Sidekick are still scarce and don’t usually cost more than $5-10, so don’t expect to spend lots of extra money on these. Of course if you are a ringtone fiend, you could end us spending $50 or more, especially if you get some of the more expensive ones that can be as high as $4 a pop. The Treo is a whole different story. It is offered now on all major U.S. carriers, and each has a different price. If you want to buy a Treo without signing up with a new carrier, you can expect to pay between $550 and $700 retail, although I have seen discounts for as low as $450. If you do switch carriers, you can get some significant discounts as with the Sidekick. Amazon.com, for example, will, as of the writing of this piece, sell you a Treo 600 for $299 through Cingular, $369 through Sprint, and $499 through AT&T. T-Mobile does not sell the Treo directly so you must go directly through PalmOne to get it. Verizon has just started selling the Treo to it’s business customers, and theoretically should start selling it to consumers as well eventually. As far as additional harware and software for the Treo, one could easily spend in the hundreds of dollars, exceeding the price of the Treo itself. This is the other edge of the sword, an even sharper edge at that! One can expand the Treo in great leaps and bounds over what it comes with. Some of these have a great bang for the buck, like some of the freeware or shareware that only costs $5-15. But even with these lower-cost items, it starts adding up after a while. I’ve already spent more on software and accessories than I did on the Treo itself, although I got the Treo highly discounted from a friend). Some of the additional software and hardware that I’m looking at would push this to three or four times the price of the Treo! Out of the box, the Treo does a great job, and one can add some critical functionality for a fairly low price, but it is a slippery slope! When individual programs are fairly cheap, your resistance to buy isn’t all that great, especially after using it for a few weeks and finding it extremely useful. So, while all of these applications are a big benefit, they do end up expanding the total cost of the device significantly, this additional cost (as well as the additional cost of the Treo itself over the Sidekick) will prevent a significant chunk of the market from opting for the Treo over the Sidekick. When the new models of both of these devices come out in the next 1-5 months, the current models should be discounted further, which will at least make the devices themselves more comparable in price, but of course the additional software and hardware for the Treo won’t get any cheaper!

Expandability: Because the Treo takes SD memory, you can greatly improve its storage capacity, enabling you to store a hundreds of songs, or thousands of pictures on a larger card. I can download a bunch of Audible.com audio books onto the device, totaling dozens of hours worth at the higher quality setting on just a 256MB card.. The Treo is also supposed to be able to read SDIO cards, which enable certain types of hardware functionality, such as high-speed wireless internet (WIFI), or GPS, but from what I’ve read, most of these cards require more voltage than the Treo can provide. The Sidekick, unfortunately, does not really have any expandability, unless you consider the external camera an expansion. It does not take any external memory.

The Future: yes, this is a review of how the current models compare, but there’s been a lot of buzz recently about the new models of both of these devices, so I thought I’d touch briefly on this because it might just change your decision. The FCC recently approved a new Sidekick model which is currently being referred to as the “Sidekick II.” Here are the main new features/improvements that have been determined by the various Sidekick internet forums, including the Sidekick Yahoo! Group and Hiptop.com, although none of these have been confirmed as of the writing of this piece:

• Better build/Reception – the new model will be made in Japan by Sharp, who has a lot of experience making consumer electronics of decent quality.
• Better Camera – a built in one this time with the same resolution as the current Treo camera plus a flash and a mirror to help compose self-portraits.
• Built-in speakerphone
• Additional buttons for gaming, volume control, answer and disconnect
• Slightly redesigned keyboard for use with T9 input.
• Thinner (but slightly longer) form factor – the swivel screen will also pitch up a bit pointing more towards the user, rather than staying at the same angle as the rest of the phone.
• Smaller, redesigned scroll wheel – the current scroll wheel has been known to break.

Notably missing are external memory, bluetooth, and infrared.

Pictures of the new Treo (variously known as the Treo 610, Treo 660 and Treo Ace) were recently leaked and various rumors have it debuting as early as this month but probably not until August or September at the earliest. It is rumored to have the following new features:

• Thinner form factor
• Better keyboard - soft keys and curved
• A much faster processor
• Bluetooth support
• Better screen - 320×320, 65,000 Colors
• Better camera – 1.2 megapixel plus Video capture capability
• Additional buttons including answer and disconnect
• New and improved web browser

Notably missing are Wifi capability, better keyboard, and more internal memory.

A final note: I really enjoyed my time with the Sidekick. It was at times enormously frustrating, but the device is undeniably very elegently designed. It’s just limited in so many ways and the kicker is that Tmobile has held it hostage and won’t let developers the fredom to publish what the market demands and bring the Sidekick to a new level The number of programs out there for the Treo make up for some of its limitations, even if some of these are still less in elegance as compared to what the Sidekick has out of the box. My main thought here is that the sky’s the limit with the Treo. There are so many great developers and companies out there creating new applications all the time. But the Sidekick is basically the same device that Tmobile and Danger introduced almost two years ago. Yes, software upgrades have helped some of the functionality (it didn’t even have cut and paste functionality for the first year it was around), and the color unit added color. A few applications have given us more functionality, but that’s about the extent of the improvements. T-Mobile’s refusal to have an open development environment for the Sidekick as well as their refusal to offer Outlook synch, has driven me away, and I know many others. In my opinion Tmobile views the Sidekick as a cool device for teens and twenty-somethings that don’t have schedules and only care about instant messaging, ringtones, games, and a cool-looking/sounding phone. They’ve felt it necessary to alienate everyone else who might have slightly different priorities but still love the Sidekick and could be using it for everything they need from a phone and a PDA. But then, if some of us old fogeys are carrying around the Sidekick, it won’t be as attractive to an 18-year-old, right? Of course I think they are cutting off their nose to spite their face. Now that I have a Treo, I can take it to Cingular/AT&T once my contract is up and Tmobile has lost not only me, but my wife and father-in-law as customers on their family plan That’s over $100/month including data services that T-Mobile would forfeit. With the Sidekick, because of the special servers involved, you have to stick with Tmobile as your carrier – it simply will not work with another GSM carrier in the U.S., with the exception of Suncom in a few markets in the Southeast. I am having a lot of fun with the Treo, and I’m liking it more and more, but I just wish that the decision was purely based on it being a better all around phone as opposed to it being about how to avoid a carrier that has clamped down on features for a device it offers for some arbitrary marketing decision made by a clueless executive.

We went to NYC for the 4th of July this year again. I’m not sure if it was because of fear of some terrorist incident or more people taking advantage of the extra day to take vacation, but the city was pretty empty, or at least the traffic was nonexistent! That was nice, and made getting in and out of the city a lot easier than even on a regular weekend.

As a kid, we used to go to the East River to watch the fireworks launch from big barges. We lived right near the 34th Street Heleport and so would watch from around there or occasionally as far down as the Waterside apartment complex in the 20’s. The view was spectacular so I got spoiled early in life as far as fireworks are concerned.

Not wanting to struggle through thick crowds this year, we took advantage of the fact that where I grew up and where my mom still lives, Kips Bay Towers, is only a block or so from the river. Although in between Kips Bay and the river is NYU Medical Center (or Tisch Hospital as it’s known now), you can still see a lot. Kips Bay consists of two big buildings with a courtyard in between. There’s another courtyard just east of the northern building, and that’s the area that’s closest to the river and thus has the best view.

We headed downstairs only 15 minutes before the fireworks were set to start, bringing just our lawn chairs and some cameras. Other residents had spreads of food and drink, but we had come from a party at my brother’s just a couple hours earlier at which we had stuffed ourselves, so of course did not need to even look at any food for quite a while!

I took a bunch of pictures with my Canon S50. I did not have a tripod with me, so had to try to hold it steady on the back of my chair, which was itself sitting somewhat unstably in spongy grass. I started off with some longer exposures trying to get more artistic (as opposed to realistic) shots, and then eventually punched up the sensitivity (ISO) and opened the aperture up so that I could get shots that were short enough to provide more realistic images. Here are some of the ones I think look the best: