I like baseball. I don’t have cable TV. And Major League Baseball doesn’t want to let me watch my beloved Toronto Blue Jays. This post will explain how I’m doing it anyway.

I’m using MLB’s brilliant MLB.tv service: for $125 for the season, you can stream, in high definition, any live baseball game. It’s a fantastic service; it does exactly what it says on the tin. But it comes with a giant asterisk: owing to the existing agreements that MLB has with local cable operators, your local team – most certainly your team – will be under blackout. It’s a total deal-killer for me; I want to watch the Jays, goddammit!

Cutting my cable a few months back was an easy decision: we literally watched zero hours of the thing, but baseball season would be the biggest challenge. With the season opener a few days ago, my “challenge” turned into desperation. Let’s describe the ways to get around the system.

On the Mac On your computer, you watch games by visiting MLB.tv. Once you’ve purchased the service, you simply log in and pick a game. A player window will open and the video will start to buffer (and it requires Flash, I’m afraid). It’s during this time that the service checks whether you’re in a blackout zone. On the computer it does this by looking at your IP address; these addresses are tied to general geographic regions, so it can accurately locate you to the city level. Therefore, to circumvent this check, you have to appear to be coming from a different IP.

Most people confronted with this problem rely on a proxy server: it’s a machine located somewhere on the net which makes requests on your behalf, forwarding traffic to you. There are services that list open proxy servers, but they are almost uniformly crappy: even if they’re actually available, they are slow and unreliable. You’ll be spending the entire game shuffling between different proxies.

Instead, I’ve engaged the services of a commercial Virtual Private Network. A VPN can be configured on your computer’s network control panel: on the Mac, it’s a simple few steps in System Preferences. Once configured, this VPN interface is like connecting your Mac transparently to another network, and the traffic between you and that network is a secure, encrypted tunnel.

The effect is that you’ll be appearing on the Internet as if you were on the VPN’s network. And if that network is located in the US, then so are you.

With the VPN connection running, you can load up MLB.tv and start watching some sweet sweet Blue Jays baseball.

I’m using StrongVPN.com. They charge $7 a month. You can choose a server in different regions in the US, though closer is better. I’m currently on a New York server, but I’ll have to switch that when we start beating on the Yankees. That plan includes unlimited data throughput, so streaming HD video for 20 games a month is no sweat (and shouldn’t be a problem for my TekSavvy Internet with its generous caps). I’ve watched two games now using the service, and it’s absolutely fantastic.

On iOS The MLB At Bat app for iPhone and iPad is a dream come true for baseball fans. If you buy the $125 season pass, you get the apps for free; otherwise a $15 in app purchase will get you the ability to stream the radio broadcast for any game, without blackout restriction. That’s how I started the season myself, thinking that would suffice.

Now, you can setup a VPN connection on iOS, but it won’t net you much: the MLB app doesn’t use your IP address to check your location. Instead it uses the device’s Location Service, which uses a combination of the GPS radio (if it has one), wireless network and IP address geolocation. If you turn off Location Service, then you can’t watch video.

The only way out is to jailbreak your iPad, and install an app called Location Spoofer. This lets you control, on a per-app basis, the location that it will report. So can pick out the MLB app, and tell it that you’re located in London, England. Why not? You’ll be subject to no blackouts, ever, and you’ll experience no delay in getting the bits, because your request isn’t going through an intermediate network.

To my mind, getting it working on the iPad only would be the best answer. It’s great to have baseball on my big-screen TV connected to my Mac mini, but nothing beats the convenience of having it on my iPad, and it would save me $7 a month.

Right now, that option isn’t open to me, because I can’t jailbreak my iPad yet; it’s simply not available for the iPad 2 running iOS 5.1. Once that jailbreak becomes available I’ll be all over it.

IM IN UR BASEBALLZ WATCHIN UR BITZ I couldn’t be more pleased to be able to watch the Jays over the Internet. But is it wrong? I don’t know. I’m paying Major League Baseball, so I’m not exactly stealing anything. But I’m circumventing their agreements with my local cable provider, with whom I am not a customer.

Given the complexity of the solutions here, I don’t see the blackout circumvention as a rampant problem, and it’s been available long enough that I don’t doubt these companies are aware of it. I could watch Hulu now, I suppose, and get Pandora, if I cared about these things.

But I figure, if I’m paying the money, I’m going to sleep at night. I hope this helps you too.

The technology industry has an amazing ability to change; it’s perhaps this property more than any other that keeps us all hanging on, waiting to see what’s next. The hardware changes the fastest: quicker processors, better displays, greater storage. More slow to change are the affiliations: you’re an IBM person, an Apple person, a Microsoft person.

With the benefit of twenty years of observation of the technology industry, I can see how these swings occur. Gradually at first, and then a tide.

It’s 2012. Who would have guessed, even five years ago, that Apple would be in the dominant position it enjoys today?

It's telling that Mac users seem to like Windows 8 more than PC users. Apple won, bitches.instapaper.com/zp52w1n4I

— Aaron Vegh (@aaronvegh) March 7, 2012

This tweet was prompted by an article by Matthew Murray on Extreme Tech, a typical pro-Windows site. And I’d seen others, particularly this one by Paul Thurrott, a famously pro-Microsoft writer. The gist of these articles is to lament the direction that Microsoft is traveling in its next iteration of Windows, due to be released by year’s end.

So why did I author such a provocative tweet? And why did I end it with so unkind a rebuke to the reader? That’s the subject of this post.

Summer, 1997

I was in the back seat of a car, traveling east on Highway 403 in Mississauga. The car belonged to my girlfriend’s father, and my girlfriend was in the front seat, while her dad drove. We were en route to their cottage for the weekend. I was never entirely comfortable with her old man; he was kind of awkward, unsure of himself, in a way that even my 22-year-old brain could pick up on. I wasn’t sure what he did, professionally, but he was clearly successful at it: he owned a fine home, cars, an amazing cottage near Wasaga Beach. He wore dress shirts, on the weekend. He was a serious business guy.

At that moment in the car, the conversation turned to my choice to use a Macintosh. I was explaining, quite naively, how I felt they had the best advantages in terms of design, ease of use, networking support, applications, etc. I wasn’t expecting any retort, but I received one: a dismissive “well, I hear they’re good for artsy-type stuff”.

It’s the thoughtlessness of the comment that I want to draw to your attention. He wasn’t evaluating anything I had said, which alone would have disputed his estimation. He was simply repeating dogma, a long and popularly-held opinion that neatly sidelined Apple and its computers. And by extension, the people who used them. I interpreted that comment as a personal attack, and the conversation ended there.

In the summer of 1997, Apple was losing. The war was over. Microsoft ruled the personal computer space, and that was that.

That incident is just one of the many I encountered over the years (and if you’re reading this, I’m sure you have your own stories). It builds a certain amount of bitterness in your heart, but it teaches an important lesson as well: the majority of people can be wrong about something.

I’m sure Apple, from Steve Jobs down to the guy writing the developer documentation, believed just as I did. That Apple was better. That Microsoft won because they played dirty, or were in the right place at the right time. That the best computing platform hadn’t won, yet.

Winter, 2012

Things change. Fifteen years later, we don’t even see Microsoft as the enemy. While they were resting on their laurels, Apple was changing the rules. Mobile computing was becoming the future, and Apple put themselves at the front of the line. The paradigm of computing is different now: going away are the complexities of the PC era. Here to stay is a computing experience based on simplicity, single focus, great design and quality.

And here lies the ideological difference between Apple and the others: that notion that truly breakthrough quality is the way to win in this market. Apple has always been about that, and it wasn’t always a winning strategy. But now, it is.

You can win a war for a lot of reasons. Because it’s a market that values “speeds and feeds” over user experience; because the people who buy the product aren’t its primary users; because inertia is a powerful force. Today, Apple is winning because it’s making the best damn product. That’s it.

And I’ll be damned if Microsoft hasn’t flat out admitted it. There’s no greater admission than the massive sea change in front of us here, in the form of Windows 8.

And those of us who have appreciated Apple’s products for all these years? Well, we kinda seem to like Windows 8 (or at least, the Metro part of it). Microsoft is doing something more Apple-like than anyone else: they’re innovating on a brand-new platform that promotes usability, great design and top quality. The results don’t look like Apple, but the ideology is awfully familiar.

So I don’t know what’s going to happen with Windows 8. It’ll either convert its apparently suspicious and uncomfortable user base, or it’ll fold in on itself and die. But there’s no doubt in my mind: by adopting Apple’s principles, Microsoft has admitted their defeat.

So when I say “Apple won, bitches”, it’s with the bitterness of twenty years of abuse. You guys, you in your starchy dress shirts, loafers and blazers. You smug cockatoos, with your arms folded, your bad haircuts and your stacks of MCSE manuals. Your knowing smirks and your thoughtlessness. Your pointless day jobs, your passionless existences, your lunch in the basement food court, your pasty skin living in fluorescent lighting.

You.

In the fall of 2010, I began working “full time” for ContactMonkey, a Toronto-based startup focusing on making it easy to give people your contact details. At the same time, I’ve continued to run Innoveghtive, my own web development shop. I don’t do a ton of client work these days, farming it out to one or more trusted hombres.

This is a rather odd position for me to be in. On the one hand, I have my natural experience as a development agency, serving at the whim of clients who pay for my effort. On the other hand now, I am working for a company developing and refining a product. I get paid a regular salary; unlike for Innoveghtive, there’s no direct connection between the work I do and the money I get paid.

At first, I brushed off that distinction as an implementation detail. I accepted the job because I was frankly having a hard time making enough on my own (The work was — and is — out there, but clients’ willingness to pay their bills? Not as much.). But lately I’ve been coming to realize that there’s a fundamental difference between these modes, and to my thinking, they are largely incompatible.

That difference came to light last week. I have been developing a stats panel to help us figure out how people are using the ContactMonkey service. It was the result of a couple months’ work, doing needs assessment, design mockups, approvals, and the implementation. I had worked hard, learned new things about myself, uttered many curse words and been kept up late at night thinking about the problems tied to this project. So when I finally rolled it out and demonstrated it for the boss, it was with the feeling of a completed project, and this is where the accolades roll in.

But no.

Instead, what I received was a set of change requests a mile long, some of them quite involved. This project wasn’t done; it was just getting started.

And I was really pissed off. This was going to add a lot more time to the project. How was I going to fit this in with the work I was planning to do then? Time equals money, so now we have to drop back and talk about extra funds…

Wait a sec. That’s agency thinking. In a product scenario, most of those pressures don’t exist. In an agency scenario, I’m wrestling with the pressure to get jobs done as quickly as possible, so I can move on to the next one. If there are enhancements or scope changes during the job, that’s a big problem, and something that needs to be dealt with quickly, because it takes us out of the discussion about work, and back to where we talk about money.

The result of that agency focus is that jobs get done more efficiently. But they also don’t get done as well. The incentive isn’t there; the very structure of the business works against it. If you want more, you have to cough up more cash. Dollars equals work.

But product focus turns that on its head. The money question has been (or should have been) taken care of. I’m working on just one thing now, and instead of getting ‘er done and moving on, I’m iterating over and over again. There’s a refinement to ContactMonkey that I’ve never brought to any of the applications I’ve developed for agency clients. When a feature we implement doesn’t work out, we shrug and excise it. When we try something small, we see if it works and then invest more time in it.

The product focus is a state any agency might aspire to, but I see it as a stark contrast. If your web-based (or mobile-based, or Mac-based) product is a core part of your business, you’re a damn fool if you outsource it. The people working on it couldn’t possibly care as much as internal staff. The agency is looking to invest as little work as they can for the budget. The product person is there with a sole focus on the results.

So in that way, it’s compelling to have a product focus. But I have to shed my preconceptions about working in that environment. I’ll lose a lot of negativity, and quite possibly produce my best work.

Photo Credit: Random Sarah

The Mac is the computer that doesn’t get in my way. I have shit to do, and the Mac lets me do it. It gets bonus points for letting me do it in style.

I’ve been a Mac user for more than 20 years, and despite the headline of this column, that’s very unlikely to change. But since I’ve upgraded to Lion, I’ve heard mutterings out there. A couple weeks ago I was listening to Build and Analyze, wherein Marco discussed his frustrations with Lion. It made me remember all of mine, and so I started a list.

This list is not exhaustive. These are the issues that actively bug me every single day. There are other issues that bite only occasionally — after all, an operating system is a big thing. Without further ado, I present my biggest Lion pet peeves.

Mail

The built-in email client, Mail.app, is one of Lion’s top features. It includes a new threaded view, has a delightful full-screen mode, and supposedly operates better with Gmail accounts. I’m an all-in Google Apps user, with four email accounts powered by the service. From an interface and interaction perspective, Mail is totally brimming with win.

In practice, I became inordinately frustrated with Mail’s performance. It’s just one problem: while composing a message, almost certainly during an auto-save cycle, the app would hang for a few seconds, then crash. Depending on how madly I’d been typing, I might lose anywhere from a sentence to a paragraph, which I could recover from the Drafts folder on restart. It’s absolutely maddening to deal with, especially as I am a high-volume emailer, and became enraged as a crash would ruin my flow.

Fortunately, Sparrow is an excellent alternative that has also received some welcome enhancements in recent months. It works brilliantly with Gmail, and suffers none of the instability.

But that is a big black mark against Lion.

Battery Life

I have a 2010 MacBook Air. When I first got it, I marvelled at the battery life: a good seven hours under normal conditions. For all practical use, that kind of battery life means I don’t have to pack a charger unless I’m going away for a trip; any intra-day foray is fine on battery alone. That means I can travel faster and lighter, and that was one of the Air’s selling points to me (and no doubt, to many others).

That all changed when I upgraded to Lion. I would guess my average battery life is down to about four hours now. I have no idea why, but I’ve heard it from too many other Lion users to believe it’s just me. Apple sure as hell didn’t advertise a 40% decline in battery life when Lion debuted! I imagined that Apple would have received enough reports of this problem to issue a fix, but here we are, two point releases into Lion, and nothing’s changed.

Of all the problems I’m having with Lion, this is the one that has me seriously considering a downgrade to Snow Leopard.

Wifi wake from sleep problem

Dan Benjamin has spent considerable air time talking about this issue. In a nut: open the lid of your MacBook, and there’s no wireless connection. Under normal, pre-Lion circumstances, the network is re-connected before you have a chance to start using the computer. And on many occasions, this is still the case. But very often, waking from sleep leaves you with no network connection. You then need to go to the Airport menu, sometimes wait for your router to reappear (I’m using an Airport Extreme base station), then select it again.

This is the kind of stuff that shouldn’t be happening in 2011.

Spaces and App Switching

I was never a fan of Spaces in Snow Leopard; the behaviour was strange and unpredictable. The new Mission Control and related Spaces behaviour makes a lot more sense; combined with full screen applications, and you’ve got yourself a terrific solution for working with a lot of open documents and applications. In fact, the new Mission Control and full screen mode is the biggest feature keeping me on Lion right now. With my built-in trackpad or my Magic Trackpad (when using my Air docked with a Cinema Display), I’m a huge fan of gestures, and I’m not eager to walk away from that.

But here’s the problem: say I’m working in Coda on Space 2, and I Command-Tab to switch to Safari, running on Space 1. Very often, the screen will move to Space 1, but instead of showing Safari, the window will appear beneath that of another running app. Safari is the active application, and I sometimes will whack Command-R to refresh the window. But I can’t see the view because TextMate is sitting on top of it.

A Command-~ will bring the window forward, but it’s a clear and nasty bug. Again, Apple’s had two point releases to fix something like this.

Address Book and iCal

I’m not going to go into depth on these two. As Apple’s interfaces have tended towards open skeuomorphism, I’ve been less offended than most. But they seem to belong better to iOS devices; on the Mac they seem tawdry and inappropriate. Address Book, formerly a much-loved and -used application on my Mac, is now a destination I try to avoid. iCal, thank Christ, has been 100 percent replaced by Fantastical. Both of these apps are abominations that look worse than their predecessors and provide poorer access to their features.

Hope

Like I said at the outset, I’m not going away. Despite my complaints, the Mac is still light years ahead of Windows 7 in terms of usability, and my brain is too old and wired to fit the way things work here.

But I think something has become clear. While Apple hasn’t abandoned the Mac, I fear they haven’t put their best people on it, either. The kinds of bugs that I’m seeing here are wide-ranging in their impact, consistent in their appearance, and persistent given how long Lion has been with us. I’d love to see these issues fixed, and I remain hopeful that they will.

But there’s nothing like a little bitching to make me feel better about it.

People, from the so-called “Apple faithful”, to Wall Street analysts, to my own mom, wonder whether Apple will prosper in a post-Jobs era. They fear that the world will never see his like again. Hell, I worried about that myself.

The more I think about it, the more laughable that fear becomes. Never mind Apple, although I am certain they’ll be just fine for generations to come. We all gave Steve too little credit. It turns out that we all learned exactly what it takes to produce mind-blowing products, and we are surrounded by them.

Consider Steve’s first innovation: the original Macintosh. He brought an artist’s eye and laser-like focus to bear on a computer engineering problem for the first time. He taught us that technology has to be wrestled like an alligator before it will yield something truly human and usable. That you have to be unrelenting to convince some people to follow your lead. That if you get together a group of “A people” and point them at a common goal, they can produce something great.

Steve invented startup culture. After the Mac, after the stories got out, entrepreneurs everywhere took his lessons to heart, and have structured their businesses similarly. You can argue with the verbal abuse and 24×7 development cycles (and I certainly would), but you can’t argue with the success: from the 1990s on, we’ve seen startup after startup tread Steve’s path. Not all of them produce “insanely great” products. But like the pace of human invention in general, we’ve seen an exponential increase in the number of high-quality, well-loved products that have attempted to make a dent in the universe.

The Nest Thermostat. Quora. Delicious Library. Panic Software.

(No coincidence that many of them are closely tied to Apple; they had a front-row view of happened in Cupertino). I guess what they have in common is a strong core vision of what the product should be, and a driving ambition to make it real. I believe Steve is largely responsible for showing us how that’s done.

Apple, through Steve Jobs, was known as a secretive company. But they had no trouble sharing their secret sauce; it’s evident in the stories we’ve heard of Apple, and it’s plain as day in Isaacson’s book. They took brilliant engineers and married their work with the liberal arts — technology and humanity together in one product. And it’s true: Apple’s competitors have simply not taken those lessons to heart. Their products are cold, unfinished, uncaring pieces of garbage. Until RIM, Samsung, Google and others come alive to what Steve has said very clearly, they’ll continue to be irrelevant. Microsoft, amazingly enough, seems to the be only one stirring in this department.

But Steve showed us that anyone can live these values. From giant corporations to talented indies, we’re seeing a thousand Steves bloom. So it’s fair to say that while Apple will be his best-known legacy, he changed us all, and we carry a bit of his ethos within us as we create our next insanely great thing.

I’ll finish with my favourite line from the book, and oh yes, it is so very germane to this discussion. Upon Steve’s return to Apple in 1997, he confronted the staff, telling them what Apple’s problem was:

“Okay, tell me what’s wrong with this place,” he said. There were some murmurings, but Jobs cut them off. “It’s the products!” he answered. “So what’s wrong with the products?” Again there were a few attempts at an answer, until Jobs broke in to hand down the correct answer. “The products suck!” he shouted. “There’s no sex in them anymore!”

Now get back to work, and don’t leave out the sex.

When I was fifteen years old, I was introduced to the Macintosh for the first time. It was 1988, and before that moment I was almost completely ignorant about computers. But this strange, peppy little box with its monochrome 9-inch display ended up turning my life upside down.

Before that moment, I thought of myself as someone who would grow up to be a writer. Over the proceeding years, my ambitions changed: from writer, to publisher, to developer. Every step intwining me deeper into the Macintosh.

Fast forward to this evening. I’m sitting in a room at the library, talking to an older woman about OS X Lion. I help run our local Mac User Group, so I suppose it was appropriate that it was there that I glanced at my Twitter feed to see the news of Steve’s death. I stood and addressed the room, some thirty in all, letting them know the news. An awkward moment passed, and conversation resumed. I took my seat, and the woman continued talking about some technical issue, as if nothing had changed. A few moments later she stopped and asked, “would you like a moment?” I had stopped paying attention to her. I was wrapped up in my own thoughts. I was, in fact, struggling to maintain my composure.

It wasn’t until I returned home that it really caught up with me. Erin had already heard the news. She held me while I cried, me feeling as if I had lost a close relative.

Like perhaps all of you, I never knew Steve Jobs. I did see him in person once (at the keynote for Macworld New York in 1999, where the original clamshell iBook was launched), but his influence in my life clearly outstrips that personal connection.

It already seems trite to talk about how he’s responsible for the stuff that I use every day. If that were all Steve were responsible for, then his passing would be far more prosaic. He didn’t put things in my life: he quite literally changed my life. I keep coming back to the image of a neutron star: a small stellar object that itself is so small, but exerts massive gravitational power. Like that star, Steve orbited my life, exerting an incredible power by placing these inventions in my hand.

Apple products empowered me to write. They empowered me to become a publisher. They are empowering me to live an independent life as a developer, where I can make a real living, and maybe some day even more than a living, in the comfort and sanctuary of my own living room. And there would be no Apple today without Steve Jobs.

He isn’t just a shadowy figure lobbing technical artifacts into our lives. He has been a dramatic example of human aspects that we don’t normally comprehend as success-inducing. Impeccable taste. Relentless drive for perfection. Obsessive attention to detail. The ability to pull the best out of the people who surround him. I can’t overstate the impact he’s had on all of us, and of all the sentiments I see on Twitter tonight, my favourite is the one where we’re encouraged to get up tomorrow morning and make something great. Insanely great.

Tonight, my heart is broken, for fear that we’ll never see his like again. But I’ll hold out the hope that instead, Steve will have projected enough of himself onto the rest of us, that together we’ll make a million Steves. That we’ll take the ethos that is Apple, and continue working to stamp out the bland, the not-fully-considered, the good-enough. The double-talk. The not-quite-ready, the boring.

I’ll miss you Steve.

The execution was marred with errors, but the worst part was that my slides were very dense with information, and most of the room wasn’t able to see them! So here is my slide deck with my speaking notes. Enjoy, and thanks for a warm reception.

Here are the slides for the presentation

But the mirror tells a different story. In the last 15 years, I’ve put on a lot of weight. Years spent sitting at my desk for long hours, eating convenience foods rather than proper meals, have taken their toll: I’ve gone from an apparently normal 160 to a pear-shaped sub-200 pounds. And that, friends, is one barrier I don’t want to cross.

Exercise regimens have failed over the years, because there’s too much goddamn work to do, and I have a family to hang out with. So, about two years ago, I acquired a standing desk. It’s really nice and pro-looking, with a dark finish and a motor that lets me move from sitting to standing with the push of a button. I used the iPhone app Lose It! to record the modest calorie burning that I attained by standing all day (about 50 per hour), and for a time, I tried to take in fewer calories. But in the way of things, that didn’t work out either, and my weight remained the same.

Sitting is definitely bad, but standing alone is not enough. It was time to take the next step: walking while working.

I’ve seen a lot of advice written about walking while working, and I wasn’t particularly thrilled about it. The setups looked gimpy and messy. That’s because treadmills traditionally have handles and top-mounted consoles. People have found ingenious ways to strap keyboards and displays around that stuff, and I think my wife has the best setup that I’ve seen, but clearly that won’t work for my standing desk.

The answer came from an article by Lex Friedman for Macworld: the TreadDesk. It’s a simple flat walking deck with a tethered control panel. Including purchase, delivery, taxes and UPS Ground’s customs brokerage boning fee, it was about $1,200. The TreadDesk arrived about a month ago and I’ve used it every working day since.

I want to cover a few topics in this post: making a treadmill part of your office, some thoughts about the TreadDesk in particular, and the benefits I’ve seen from using it. Let’s dive in.

Fitting the TreadDesk into the Office

My office is the front living room in my house; it’s a pretty sweet setup that offers tons of natural light. However, my office was arranged in such a way that the treadmill didn’t fit. It’s a 5-foot-long piece of hardware that sits on the floor; finding a way to integrate it naturally into my working environment was decidedly non-trivial. Here’s a picture of my office when the treadmill first arrived:

TreadDesk actually sells flooring components that can sit around their treadmill. It makes a raised platform that turns the treadmill into a moving level surface, letting you sit and stand on the same ground, as it were. I didn’t opt for that solution, given the cost and the complexity of arranging it on my floor. So the first step was to move everything in my office to give the treadmill more space, but keep it out of the way when not in use.

The ultimate solution came about thanks to Erin’s clever use of paper cutouts to approximate the size and positioning of the various furniture items in my office. We could then readily determine the best way to arrange things. Here’s the layout of my office in its “before” state:

The new plan puts the treadmill and desk on the opposite wall, and gives me access to the full length of the main desk, so both treadmill and chair can sit side-by-side. My 24-inch Cinema Display is on an articulating arm, and is positioned to favour the standing/walking side of the desk, while it can swing to work with the sitting side as well. Here’s a picture of the new desk. The whole office feels like a more open environment, and I’m really happy with the way it turned out:

The take-home here is that if you’re getting a treadmill in your office, you have to find a way to get it against a wall — if it’s sitting in the middle of your floor space it’s going to look like shite, and you don’t want that.

TreadDesk: The Review

The treadmill itself came in a heavy-duty cardboard box, trussed up like Hannibal Lecter. There was very little installation; you simply pull it out of the box and connect the console.

The treadmill itself is the model of simplicity: it appears to be of pretty high quality, but it’s not as heavy-duty as treadmills you’d see in a gym: keep in mind it’s intended for walking only, and has a maximum speed of 4 miles per hour. To effectively work while walking, the fastest you could go is 1.5 mph, and I have it at an even 1.

The treadmill runs very quietly. Turn it on, set your speed and start walking; it’s that simple. In the four-plus weeks I’ve had it, I’ve found it easy to clean around as well: the back is easy to lift and get the vacuum cleaner through underneath.

As much as I’d like the treadmill to be a leave-it-and-forget-it proposition, it does require some amount of maintenance. Every month (assuming you use it every day, as I do), you need to re-lubricate the walking deck beneath the belt. There’s a provided tiny bottle of lubricating oil for this purpose, and it’s fairly simple to apply. I can see that I’ll have to hit the local Canadian Tire in a few weeks to get a larger supply, as it looks like I’m definitely not getting more than three applications’ worth.

There’s really only one complaint that I have about this TreadDesk: the console.

I included a can of Programmer Juice to give you a sense of scale. Holy crap, is it big! This is the sort of console that would be included with a Soviet-era treadmill desk. “In Soviet Russia, treadmill walks you!”

I have this fantasy of mastering electronics, putting together an Arduino playset, and hacking the signals to the treadmill to make a more elegant console. But in practice, this console, which sits on a very sturdy, heavy, pad-footed metal stand, works very well. However, the console tracks time, but its display is limited to 99 minutes and 99 seconds; once it trips over that amount, it goes back to zero. Of course, I’m walking for much longer than that, so I can’t get an accurate time for a day’s “travel” (of course, if I’m walking at 1mph, then I can calculate the time. But still!). But I’ve learned to care more about the distance (in miles, naturally) and calorie count.

Health Benefits

So I’ve laid down a small bag of cash, turned my office upside down, and changed the way I work. Is it worthwhile?

On the day my treadmill arrived, I weighed 198 lbs. This morning, five weeks later, I weighed in at 193 lbs.

I can feel it working. My legs are tired after a day of walking. After the first two days, I had to stop walking for a couple days so I could recover. You have to start slowly, even though walking 1mph feels absolutely silly. Start with a couple hours a day, and then gradually increase your time.

Even now, I still feel like I’m hitting my limits after walking 5 miles. Today I pushed myself a bit and walked over 6. Sitting down is bliss. In the early days, I found I was absolutely ravenous with hunger by mealtimes. Things seem to have settled down a bit there, fortunately.

The console calculator indicates that an hour of walking at 1mph equals about 80 calories. My six-plus mile walk today netted me 500 calories — a pretty serious dent on a day’s caloric intake! The Lose It! app tells me I get 1600 calories a day to eat with; calories burned in exercise give me more that I can use. So you can see how much of a difference even 400 calories (my average per day) can make on a diet plan.

To make a long story short, I do feel that the TreadDesk is going to help me lose weight.

Conclusions

I undertook the decision to setup a treadmill desk very seriously. The cost was extremely difficult to swallow, especially knowing that a lot of it was going to go into shipping and UPS! But now that it’s here, and now that I’m using it, and now that it’s proving to work, I couldn’t be more pleased.

As I work during the day, I see a lot of people jogging by my house; everyone trying their own exercise routines. The funny thing is, I don’t see the same people all the time. It’s a sure sign that I’m watching these people try to get into shape and ultimately failing.

The best part of the treadmill desk is that it integrates fitness into my workday. It’s a delicious hack that can have real benefits. I may not be able to change my over-stuffed schedule, prepare healthy home-cooked dinners every night, or get out for a run. But while I’m working, I’m losing weight. And that’s pretty satisfying.

The switchover to the new service took about five weeks, owing primarily to the fact that I owned my cable modem (Rogers required you to buy a modem for their “Extreme” service a few years back). Once the switch was complete, Rogers could take anywhere from 20 minutes to 48 hours to release their hold on my cable modem, and let TekSavvy assign me an IP address. Yes, of course it ended up being 48 hours, without Internet.

Last Tuesday, my Internet went down. I called TekSavvy and was told that Rogers’ local DHCP server for TekSavvy users was having a problem, and several other users in my area were also down. My ticket was filed, and I was told that Rogers could take up to 48 hours to respond. Two full days.

So I waited till Thursday before calling them back. Right away I was greeted with an automated response: cable service was down for Pickering, Ajax and Whitby. Most of Durham Region, for TekSavvy anyway, was without service.

As it happened, I was going away for the weekend to New York City. But while I was there, I continued to check on my network remotely. By my calculations, it didn’t come back online until sometime Sunday afternoon. A good six days without Internet.

Now, this may come off as sounding like the lead headline in First World Problems Magazine (featuring “OMG! I Broke a Nail!” and “They Ran Out Of Mayo And My Club Sandwich Sucks!), but as a work-and-live-at-home hermit, the Interwebz are important to me. So bear with me here.

My first question here is, who’s to blame?

TekSavvy called me today and asked if my Internet was okay. That was kind, and it was good to speak to someone, as I was planning to call them myself tomorrow for an explanation. The woman who called had no information other than what I’d already been told, and that it was essentially Rogers’ fault. Also, my account will be credited for the time I didn’t have the Internet.

But assuming we take them at their word (and I’ve no reason not to), am I satisfied to leave it at this? Apparently not. Because while this may be Rogers’ fault, there’s clearly something deeply broken here. In the ten-plus years I’ve been a Rogers customer, I can count my total downtime in hours, not days. And now, in the first months of my time with TekSavvy, I’m down for most of a week. It might be an unfortunate coincidence, but to date I’m not at all convinced that this won’t happen again.

Aside from a followup call from TekSavvy, I have no information from the company as to what happened, and what is being done to assure me that future incidents will not occur. They have no blog, no Twitter presence, in fact little to no outreach to their general customers at all, from what I can see.

All the nerds I know in the Toronto area are big TekSavvy fans. But when things go wrong, what can the company do about it? They seem to be at the mercy of Rogers. And I can’t help but think that Rogers is going to no effort to help us out.

I don’t know about the nature of Rogers’ agreement with TekSavvy, but it clearly doesn’t put support very high on the list. And while I would love to stay with TekSavvy, if this turns out to be the start of a trend, I’m going to have no choice but to return to Rogers, where having the Internet is more important than having meager bandwidth caps.

So if you’re out there, TekSavvy, this message is for you: figure out your problems with Rogers, yes. But also be more open to your customers about what’s going on. Internet isn’t a “nice to have”; it’s a utility that I rely on. Start acting like it, because I’m another outage away from switching back.

But as part of HP’s colossal failure to sell the TouchPad, they threw the biggest bone ever right into my doggy bowl: a $99 tablet computer, available immediately. I learned about this on Friday night via Twitter while helping my daughter with bedtime. Fifteen minutes later I was standing in an alarmingly growing crowd at my local Future Shop, and luckily was the first to claim one of the final four units they had in stock.

So while you may have read reviews of the TouchPad before, what you may not have read are reviews of this completely-new-and-not-at-all-like-the-original-TouchPad. Because at $99, the mechanics of your purchase decision are completely changed.

It reminds me of the Kindle at the time of the iPad’s arrival. At $479, it was a tough sell against the first-generation iPad, and we predicted its demise. We were right: the price has dropped under $200, and now it’s a completely different product. iPad owners are also Kindle owners.

Like any gadget-loving nerd would, I spent way too much time this past weekend playing with the TouchPad. And while I can see that it’s a deeply flawed product, I’m also a budding fan of WebOS, and have no choice but to root for HP (or some other company) to give it the love and watering it deserves.

Let’s start with the hardware.

The Top Twelve Problems

The Internet loves lists. I could put together a list of the Top Twelve Things That Are Wrong With The TouchPad, but let’s face it: the first ten items on that list would be performance. Performance, performance, performance! It just isn’t fast enough to run the damn operating system. Apps take too long to launch, but I’m not too exercised about that.

The worst part is the graphical responsiveness of the system. The iPad shines because a touch on the screen results in immediate and fluid feedback. The TouchPad judders and stalls when you swipe through text. It’s not terrible, pervasive and all-encompassing; sometimes web pages work well and performance is smooth. It just happens often enough that your eye and brain become accustomed to it.

At its core, the WebOS is aptly-named: the whole thing is a giant web browser, and the apps are web apps. Because HTML rendering and Javascript interpreting are high-level functions, there’s a lot of cruft under the hood to support it. Now, I’ve listened to folks like Marco Arment talk about its deficiencies as if they were incurable. I don’t believe that — I’ve seen the work Apple has done with JavascriptCore for iOS, so I know that it’s possible for web technologies to render smoothly on this level of hardware. To my mind, it’s just a question of the WebOS team getting the right engineering talent to optimize the shit out of the OS’s internals.

But I can’t help but think of what this WebOS engineer had to say about the decisions around the hardware. If his statements are true, HP decided upon the hardware inside the TouchPad even before they bought Palm. And that’s a damn crime, because we all know that improving hardware can compensate for the inefficiencies of the software. Did HP have the chance to put faster horses under the hood, and pass on it? I don’t know, but one thing’s for certain: this carriage needs faster horses.

Once we get past the top ten problems with the TouchPad, we get into two smaller issues I have with the case itself. The first is the weight: at over 1.5 pounds, it’s noticeably heavier than the iPad 2, though pretty close to the original. I find weight an important metric in tablets of course, owing to the fact that I’m holding it while reading. Especially when reclined, a 1.5-pound sliver of technology is going to dig into my stomach. And it’s also very thick, thicker even than the original iPad, while its high-gloss, rounded plastic finish (reminiscent of the iPhone 3G/S upon which it was no doubt based) feels unreliable in the hand, prone to slip.

And the home button. Like the iPad, there’s a single button on the face of the device. But it’s much smaller than the iPad, and not easily spotted; in other words, it’s hard to know which way the TouchPad is sitting with a quick glance.

Ultimately, I really feel like the hardware has let down this effort, because the software is such a brighter story.

The WebOS

There’s no sense building up to it: I really like WebOS. Back in the day I derided it as a cheap ripoff of iOS. But now it feels like one of the most genuinely original mobile operating systems out there (nota bene: I have not had hands-on experience with Windows Phone 7).

While WebOS couldn’t have existed without Apple, it’s clear they’ve made decisions that are refinements on Apple’s effort. This goes well beyond gunning for Apple’s weak spots like Flash support. It’s in the card metaphor, which lends itself so well to multitasking. And it’s also in its developer APIs (which I may write about separately later on), which are designed from the ground up to include as many developers as possible.

Aesthetically, WebOS challenges the simplicity of iOS. It has a consistency of design that delivers its message with confidence. It’s carefully-considered, understated and yet it’s very rich. This is not a thin veneer: the quality of the user experience permeates every layer of the operating system. The Window chrome, system-wide typeface choices and tasteful backgrounds are all a great start, but the quality of the interaction with applications (via a brilliant card interface) and a terrific notification interface leave you with the impression of a well-built and well-considered system design.

I also very much like the keyboard. Right off the bat, they integrated a fourth row for numbers and symbols, much more like a traditional keyboard. I found text entry easy to do — it’s clear a lot of thought went into mimicking the best parts of iOS in this department. Text autocorrections are very well-done, despite the lack of some obvious items like the two-spaces-inserts-a-period trick that I rely upon with my iPad.

The basic applications are well-implemented. The web browser is as good as you’d expect for being based on Apple’s WebKit, and it works very well. The email client is quite exceptional, working brilliantly with all my Google Apps email accounts, with one-tap support for various web-based email servers (including MobileMe). It uses the “sliding pane” paradigm popular in TouchPad interfaces to great effect. This view technique is WebOS’s answer to the iPad’s Split View, which has proven far more rigid and less appealing in portrait orientation. I really like WebOS’s implementation, which makes every app more like the official Twitter app for iPad. Which I like very much.

It comes with everything you would expect from a tablet computer: a calendar, notepad app (“Memos”), PDF reader, map application, address book, photo and video viewer (it supports the same video formats as iOS, though video performance suggests a lack of support from the on-board GPU), and even a Facebook app, if you’re into such frivolities.

Critics have gone to some lengths talking about the paucity of software for the TouchPad, but I don’t have those complaints. The HP App Catalog, to my mind, is a terrific app in its own right. It features a monthly magazine called Pivot, an actual editorial effort to feature recent and interesting apps with links to their product pages. It’s beautiful and well-designed. You can also navigate the store in traditional ways: I found the categories well-populated with titles, and search was straight-forward. Unlike the purported experience with the Android Market, apps are clearly shown to be designed for the TouchPad, and every category has several options. I was able to find decent apps for most of my traditional tablet functions: WeatherBug, WordPress, TuneIn Radio, TED, Simple Podcatcher, Paper Mache (Instapaper) and Spaz HD (Twitter). None of these apps would compare favourably to their iOS counterparts, but they’re quite good and with enough developer support could become much better.

One app that did stand out for me was Typewriter. It’s a Markdown editor that saves its documents to Dropbox. It’s in beta right now, but it features a unique preview method. You write in plain text using Markdown. But there’s a bar at the bottom of the screen; as you pull it up, it reveals the formatted text “underneath”. It’s very elegant, well-designed, and probably the most impressive third-party app I saw.

I can’t help but think that with more time, support from third parties could make this a very compelling mobile platform. Nobody knows today what’s going to happen with WebOS, but to my mind anything less than full-fledged support from a large company like HP would be criminal.

The software side is much brighter than the hardware side, but it’s not all perfect. I’ve already talked about performance. Performance! Performance! It’s the biggest problem with this device. But there’s also a couple spots where WebOS needs to focus.

First up is text selection. iOS didn’t have this really working on day one, demonstrating that it’s a non-trivial undertaking to do right. Sadly, WebOS still doesn’t have it figured out: I found the process frustrating and error-prone. It seems to be based on the same idea as iOS, in that you tap a word and pull at the markers to alter your selection. But the implementation simply falls over, with easy misses removing your selection, and juddery animation frustrating your selection.

Another problem is in scrolling text. iOS has a delightful attention to detail in this regard: if you start a motion in one axis, the scroll direction stays locked to that axis. By starting to scroll down on an article, for example, the scroll direction will continue vertical even if your finger drifts to the right or left. On WebOS, there’s no lock: the view moves wherever your finger goes. It’s a subtle effect, but makes a big difference in day-to-day use.

Conclusions

Those two issues are, frankly, not deal breakers for WebOS. If I compare WebOS’s foibles with Android (which I’ve used extensively on the phone side), it’s a dramatic improvement. Android is death by a thousand cuts, with software deficiencies at every turn. WebOS provides a very high-quality experience, marred only by its underpowered hardware.

How bad is it? Like so many digital experiences, it depends on where you’re coming from. Like so many of the folks in my Twitter stream, if you come from an iPad, the TouchPad is going to stand out for its poor hardware. This group has been, to put it politely, dismissive about the $99 TouchPad. But they’re a demanding bunch, and their advice should be taken with a grain of salt.

For the average computer user, the TouchPad is an incredibly beautiful and effective platform. Dramatically simpler than a PC, it still lets you do all the things you’d want out of a computer — web browsing, email, Facebook, Twitter and photo viewing. It makes a good electronic reader, it has good video support (YouTube is especially effective here, thanks to one of the better Flash implementations I’ve seen), and for the most part, it’s simple and elegant enough for less technical users to understand.

It feels like there’s been no small amount of gloating out there, particularly by iOS advocates, and that’s a damn shame. They are certainly correct that they still have the better platform, but we benefit from having a multiplicity of options in the market. If this truly is the end of WebOS, then we’ll have lost something very important.

So, in the final equation, is the $99 TouchPad a worthy buy? Holy shit, yes. As I remarked on Twitter when I come home with it, I feel like I’d donned a balaclava and taken up a blackjack, and robbed my local Future Shop blind. HP’s $100 million bath is the kind of opportunity that doesn’t come around very often, and while it spells a very uncertain future for WebOS, it remains that I now have a delightfully-designed 10-inch touchscreen device that can handle a broad variety of computing tasks. It’s a clear win.

If $99 is a bet on the future of WebOS, it’s one I feel comfortable taking. Having read the commentary and the (not entirely cogent) announcements from HP, I think there’s a better than even chance that WebOS will continue to survive. And now that a quarter million TouchPads are in peoples’ hands, it’s also possible that HP has seeded the market for future developers. I hope so.

Postscript: I also took some time to investigate the WebOS SDK. Given its basis on web technologies, it makes a pretty compelling platform to build for. If there’s interest from my readers, I may write about that experience as well.