Much as I want to get a tablet PC as my next computer (not that I can afford even a laptop power supply for the next 18 months but, hey, one can dream, right?) I worry that it might not be powerful enough for my needs. At least not in the medium-term…but more on that later. For now though, since I am a student who moves around a great deal and whose primary computer is a laptop (so it needs to go with me everywhere), I need to be as mobile as possible. I would get that mobility with a tablet PC; while its slate-mode functionality would significantly increase my productivity. I also value performance very highly — I play computer games and edit graphics and audio — and most high-end tablet PCs (i.e. the latest offerings from Fujitsu, Lenovo, and HP) would let me do some of that which, for the time being, is sufficient for my needs.

The problem is that, the more mobile a computer is, the less powerful it generally is. If you list computers in increasing order of power and, therefore, in decreasing order of mobility you get this:

• Ultra-mobile PCs (UMPCs) — diary-sized, with 4 to 7-inch screens
• Small tablet PCs — A4 page-sized, with 9 to 10-inch screens
• Regular tablet PCs — ring binder-sized, with 12 to 13-inch screens
• Regular laptops — file folder-sized, with 14 to 15-inch screens
• Gaming/media laptops — box file-sized, with 15 to 17-inch screens
• Regular desktops — standard, with 15 to 22-inch screens
• Gaming/media desktops — large, with 19 to 30-inch screens (maybe even multiple screens)

My previous laptop (the one that died a few months ago) was a regular laptop. The one I am using now is a four year-old regular laptop (so it’s smaller, heavier, and less powerful than a modern-day regular laptop). If I was to get a laptop next week, I would unhesitatingly get a regular, convertible tablet PC. That much is clear. Now this would be nice for a while. For quite a while, actually; that is, at least for the duration of my studies.

Once I graduate and get a job, since I would continue to use this as my primary computer at everywhere but work, I would then want to buy a large-ish external monitor for it and maybe a nice keyboard and mouse too. That would be just fine as well.

Eventually, though, there would come a time when I would want to play the latest versions of my favourite computer games and use the latest versions of my favourite resource-intensive (mainly multimedia-editing) software packages. That’s when the tablet PC’s lack of computing power would start to pinch (mainly the lack of a dedicated graphics card). I would then seriously consider buying a gaming/media desktop (I would be rolling in money by now, see?).

Now, knowing (more accurately: hoping) that this is how things will play out, I wonder: to avoid having to buy two computers (as if that’s a bad thing), should I just buy a nice powerful laptop now instead of that tablet PC? Fortunately, my answer is am emphatic no. The fact is I do need to use a computer in two different ways and that there isn’t one computer that will do both things for me (i.e. be both mobile and powerful).

What, then, was the point of writing all this? What is the moral of my little story? I think the point of writing all this is simply to say that some day, when I grow up, I am going to be just like James Kendrick :)

After reading mobility and tablet PC veteran James Kendrick’s recent articles about his life with tablet PCs I got to wondering about what my ideal life with tablet PCs would be like. Before I get to that, though, check out Kendrick’s articles.

In his first, ‘A day in the life - a tale of two tablets‘, he writes about how he uses his three computers — a small tablet PC (Fujitsu LifeBook P1610), a regular tablet PC (Lenovo ThinkPad X61t), and a media desktop (Apple MacBook Pro) — in his work and home life, keeping them synchronized and choosing to use one over the other depending on what his work day is going to be like. In his second, ‘Using multiple devices intelligently‘, he goes into a little more detail about how he manages to do all this intelligently and effectively.

Which, by the way, reminds me of an brilliant article posted a couple of months ago on Student Tablet PC on an electronic filing system for managing class notes, handouts, assignments, books etc. That article, ‘Studying in the Humanities - Part 1: My Electronic Filing System‘, is a must-read for any student considering buying a tablet PC for university.

Oh, and one more fun article on tablet PCs is ‘Crazy UMPC People‘ by Tech Art’s Miles McCusker who says:

Out of nowhere, I’ve found myself hooked on reading blogs about Ultramobile PC’s (UMPC’s) and tablets-PC. I’m addicted to reading about the lives these people lead, constantly receiving, buying, using and reviewing Tablet PC and UMPC’s as well! I’m not sure where they get the money? I mean, they can’t seem to get enough of them! More annoyingly… neither can I stop reading about whole thing.

He then goes on to discuss whether he needs a UMPC or not. It’s a lot of fun.

For what it’s worth, my thoughts on my life with tablet PCs is coming up…

Continuing my discussion on popular science fiction books, Sci-Fi Lists maintains a list of the Top 100 Sci-Fi Books, Short Stories, Films, and TV Shows. I don’t know how accurate this lists is — or if there can ever be a definitive list of top 100 anything — but this is a good a list as any. Actually, it’s better than most. It’s also useful as a guide or check list for good science fiction.

Though for films, IMDb probably has the best set of listings. Maybe even for the top rated sci-fi titles because it’s not just science fiction fans that contribute to the ranking. That kind of listing is more relevant in the “real world” since making films is, unfortunately, a little more about the financial bottom line than, well, anything else really. Such is life.

It’s that time of the year again: when the World Science Fiction Society (WSFS) holds its annual World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon). This year (Nippon 2007) it’s being held in Yokohama, Japan from 30 August to 3 September. It is during this convention that WSFS members vote on and, subsequently, award the year’s Hugo Awards (George Takei will be special co-host at the awards ceremony!). The 2007 nominees include authors such as Vernor Vinge and Neil Gaiman (among a whole bunch of others, of course).

I have read only one of this year’s nominated works (’Kin’ by Bruce McAllister) but intend to read most of the rest and watch all of the nominated movies (”dramatic presentations - long form”) some time soon as well. Coming to the point of this post: some of the nomiated books are available for free as eBooks from Fictionwise. If you’re into science fiction and fantasy, make sure you check those out.

The new full-time MBA batch started Orientation Week (O-Week) at Melbourne Business School (MBS) this Monday. As part of O-Week, three of us from the Class of 2008 were invited to sit on a panel during the Career Services orientation session. Our topic was internships and our internship experience thus far. Although we were told we didn’t have to formally prepare any answers, of course we all made a list (mental or physical) of the points we wanted to get across. This was mine:

1. Getting an internship is hard work. You have to start early and work really hard at it. Research and networking both play important roles in getting you the internship you want.

I, for example, got my internship without the help of the Career Services department. I almost got one through them as well, but lost out in the final round because the company’s plans changed (they needed someone immediately and I still had a month left in my study term) so they hired the other candidate instead. I talked a bit about using local job search engines, the library’s resources, and blogs to carry out research and acquire industry knowledge (aside from using the the other, usual information sources, of course).

My classmates also talked about the extensive preparation they went through during their internship application process. This included getting others to read your resume & cover letter and practicing case interview questions.

2. Be realistic about your internship. See where you are now, where you want to be after you graduate, and then get an internship that puts you somewhere in the middle. If you’re changing industries, be ready to work in a more junior position than the one you eventually want to be hired for.

3. Be strategic about your internship. Don’t apply to every opportunity you come across. Pick and choose the ones you realistically think you can get — or the ones you really, really want to get — and focus on those.

Another important point that came up during the discussion was that the Australian definition of ‘internship’ is sometimes very different from the North American one. Here internships are often 6-12 month long work experience roles (almost apprenticeships). To do an MBA-style internships you may have to apply for a 3-month contract or short-project role (which, by the way, is what I did). Also, a lot of people (even those working in large multinationals) here don’t know what an MBA is. You sometimes have to say “I’m doing a graduate degree in business. Could I do a short, three-month project for you?”.

I spent the rest of my turn talking about my personal experience before I started the MBA (my background, etc.), a bit about my first two study terms, and what my internship was like (including a bit about which MBA learnings I got to apply in my internship). Overall, the career services panel sessions (there was an alumni panel that immediately preceded us) were really good. Here’s hoping they take our advice and do a good job.

Australian Idol 2007 started a couple of weeks ago. The Aussies have been very innovative with the show: last year they insisted on changes to the franchise that made it much more interesting. That’s paid off this year, with many more serious musicians lining up to audition. It should be a fun season. If all goes well, I’ll blog about it too :)

Continuing my discussion on the use of type in films (see my previous post), I also recently read a good article on the use of subtitles in Tony Scott’s ‘Man on Fire’. I’ve mentioned this in passing on this blog before, but Speak Up does a whole lot more…and has screen shots as well :)

In Man on Fire, Tony Scott turns its obligatory subtitles into visual stimuli for the movie, intertwining — sometimes gently, other times abruptly — typography into its scenes. The subtitles, rendered most of the time in Franklin Gothic, are not confined to the top layer of the film, they have depth and perception, they wait for their turn and they, like their real-life actors, hit their mark as told. This, however, is not groundbreaking, many movies have used typography better and many of the visual puns in Man on Fire are reminiscent of Typography 101 exercises (How do you make type scream? You make it big and bold, silly). Nonetheless, Man on Fire achieves small, visual victories that add charisma and personality to commonly bland and uninspiring subtitles.

[Source: http://www.underconsideration.com/speakup/archives/002231.html]

If you’re into typography, make sure you give it a read.

Helvetica

The Helvetica documentary is now available on DVD! I still haven’t watched it and am dying to get my hands on it. Hmmm…something must be done. I wonder if it’ll be available for sale in any of the bookstores here. I hope so!

I love typography (and everything that goes along with it). In fact, the only bit of artistic drawing that I can do is related to the shapes and styles of words and letters (or, more generally, simple geometric shapes). Typography is also a large part of my work (website design). As a result, I visit typography websites (such as Typographica.org), subscribe to design blogs, download and experiment with lots of fonts, use lots of fonts, and so on. Over the last couple of weeks, I read a couple of interesting articles on the use of typography in Harry Potter & the Order of the Phoenix (HP&OTP) movie that I thought I should share:

The first is by Design Observer who says:

But it’s not just the villains who pull focus, for this most recent theatrical release includes an even more pronounced paradigm shift: it may just be the first film in which letterforms, once the purview of the production designer, break free and actually join the cast.

[Source: http://www.designobserver.com/archives/026935.html]

And then Perez-Fox goes on to say:

In Order of the Phoenix, the wizarding world is engulfed in a sort of media war. Since Voldemort is still underground, most of the dramatics are surrounding slander and perceptions, rather than gunslinging, so to speak. So it is fitting the wizarding paper of record, The Daily Prophet, gains a life of it’s own, and really tells the story better than ever before

[Source: http://www.perezfox.com/2007/08/10/the-typography-of-harry-potter/]

They’re good articles and, if you’re into this type of thing (haha, I made a pun!), be sure to check them out.

WARNING: This post contains spoilers. If you haven’t read the book yet, don’t read this post. You have been warned.

So yesterday I finished re-reading Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows (HP&DH). Damn, it’s a good book. And although Rowling didn’t tie up all the loose ends of the plot (I’m dying to know what happens to Umbridge, for example), she did fill us in on most of the important details. The rest she discussed in various interviews and web chats. If you want to know more, here are some of the articles that you should read: 

• Finished ‘Potter’? Rowling tells what happens next
• Rowling: I wanted to kill parents
• Stop your sobbing! More Potter to come
• Confused by Potter? Author sets record straight
• Read the full Bloomsbury transcript of the webchat with J.K. Rowling on 30 July 2007
  (or, if you have a low-bandwidth connection, here’s the direct link)

I could talk about the book some more but, now that she herself can discuss it, Rowling has done most of the talking anyway.

By the way, if you want an incredibly concise summary of the book, check out the spoiler t-shirt at the Harry Potter Plot Enlightenment Project :)

The Movie

What I can talk about, however, is what the movie version of this book will be like. If you have read HP&DH, and have also read my post on Harry Potter & the Order of the Phoenix (HP&OTP), you will have noticed that, of the three items missing from the movie that I was unhappy about, two of them play a rather important part in the last book. Namely the fact that Harry’s tell-all article doesn’t get published in the Quibbler (which feeds into the Xeno Lovegood story arc) and that, in Snape’s memories, we don’t see the bit where Lily defends Serverus (which is needed for the final Snape story arc; “The Price’s Story” as it’s called in the book). The second omission can be easily fixed since, for the final movie, they’ll probably just append that bit to scene they did show in the HP&OTP movie.

The first omission, on the other hand, doesn’t bode well. At least for Xeno Lovegood because I’m guessing they’ll cut him out of the final movie entirely. Instead, Harry, Ron, and Hermione will figure out the Hallows-Peverell connection themselves and the whole scene will be summed up in a short dialogue between Hermione and Ron. Oh well.

They’ll probably also cut out the wedding. The trio will make a run for it soon after the Minister has given them the stuff that Dumbledore left them in his will. That whole time-in-the-wilderness bit will also probably be replaced by a montage. And they might skip the whole Ron leaving and coming back story arc as well. Yes, indeed, there’s lots to cut out. If I had the time, I would write down a summary of the book’s plot and would chip away at it until I came up with the smallest plot threat that could tell the whole story. I would then cut it down further to see what could be done (i.e. which parts of the plot could be told) quicker. And cheaper, which fewer special effects. And then I would wait for the movie to see how my version compared with what they came up with. Yes, that would be an interesting exercise. If I had the time. Oh well.

Everyone has his or her own way of writing things. This ‘way’ includes spelling choices (British vs. American); whether you use a serial comma (or Oxford comma) or not; which other punctuation marks you regularly use (brackets, dashes, hyphens, ellipses, emoticons, colons, semicolons, slashes, quotation marks, apostrophes, etc.); how and when you use boldface and italics; how you write times (3:15 PM, 3:15pm, 0315, 0315 HRS, etc.) and dates (30 August, August 30, etc.); how you quote material and write titles of published works… The list goes on.

For most of these things, I prefer one way over the other(s) and I stick with that in all my writing. Though sometimes, I use a hybrid. For example, I will mostly use British spellings (colour) but will use American ones when writing for select words (standardize). Sometimes I switch between the two systems, depending on what I’m writing. Here, for example, I would probably write ‘programme’. For a university assignment, I would probably write ‘program’. On the Internet and in programming, I have to use ‘color’ instead of ‘colour’ all the time. It’s not that hard to switch, though.

There are two style choices, however, I’m not so sure about: writing times and writing titles. And my not sticking with one convention is starting to get on my nerves.

Writing Times

I tend to switch between two writing styles when writing times. I use uppercase ‘AM/PM’ when writing specific times, such as “the movie runs from 11:30 AM to 1:15 PM”. But I use the lowercase ‘am/pm’ when writing times within flowing text, such as “see you at 3pm”. In my opinion, “see you at 3:00 PM” reads too formally.

My problem, however, is that I am tempted to use the lowercase ‘pm’ notation all the time (ha ha, a pun!). I know that’s what some writing style standards use and I am tempted to adopt that all the way as well. Maybe I will. Meanwhile though, I’m stuck in the middle.

Writing Titles

And then there are titles of published works. Which do you think is correct: “I watched ‘Transformers’ on the weekend” or “I watched Transformers on the weekend”?  Both are, actually. It depends on whether you’re using rich text (in which you can use italics) or plain text (in which you can’t).

At one level, I want to use plain text all the time. That is, I would write the movie title within apostrophes. I would also write things like: “The movie was *really* good” instead of “The movie was really good”. By doing this I don’t have to worry about people using plain text e-mail clients or about any font conversion problems (though that’s more for smart quotes in word processing programmes). It’s also pretty clear in the first version that I am emphasizing the word ‘really’ so that’s not much of an issue either. For the most part, though, my choice is determined by the context. If I don’t know which e-mail system someone is using, for example, I stick with plain text. When I know someone uses rich text, I will use the italics (and boldface and bullet points, etc.).

For blogs such as this one, though, things are different. I can use italics all the time with no problems whatsoever. Why don’t I, though? Well, primarily because I’m a bit of a computer snob and I think plain text is the ‘classic’, format independent, platform independent way of doing this (i.e. it’s cooler…in a geeky kind of way). And if I switch over to using italics all the time then…well, then, I should start doing that everywhere else too (i.e. in my e-mails, documents, etc.). Right now, I’m stuck in between the two and am, therefore, somewhat inconsistent. Even on this blog. And it bugs me.
By the way, last year I finally resolved the quotation mark vs. apostrophe issue that I used to have. I now use apostrophes to emphasize words or phrases. That’s why, a couple of paragraphs ago, I wrote ‘really’ instead of “really”. I then use quotation marks only for direct quotes from speech or text. You might, when you read this, be thinking: “Well, duh! That’s the way it’s supposed to be”. But please understand that I come from a computer programming background where only single characters are placed within apostrophes. All other text is placed within quotation marks. It took me a while to finally get that out of my system!

Style Manuals

One way to resolve my dilemma, of course, is for me to choose a style manual I like and then stick with it. Nadia, for example, follows the Chicago Manual of Style (CMS). I follow that for the most part as well. The Oxford Manual of Style is another popular one and most publishing houses (academic and otherwise) generally have their own, internal, published or unpublished writing guides. Of the ones available on the web, the two more popular ones are the Economist Style Guide (though that’s mostly for magazine and journal research) and the Wikipedia Manual of Style (which is primarily an encyclopaedia style guide).

I mostly follow Chicago though I do take elements from other style guides. At least I think I do. I havent actually read all of CMS to see whether I’m following it or not! What I do know, though, is that, in the am/pm vs. AM/PM debate, Chicago chooses the latter. And we’re back to my indecision.