Padi padi, iPad!

I've been pottering about with the iPad for a smidge more than 4 months now, after the missus very kindly gifted me one for my birthday. I'm not going to say anything other reviewers who have been smitten with the thing have not said. I am going gush about its virtues and how 'cool' it is. Never before in the history of mankind has a single company generated so much interest among layman. No, scratch that. I'm sure folks behind the invention of fire, the tyre and sliced bread generated an equally high level of interest.

Every since I laid my hands on a device at an Apple store, I've wanted it. Sure it's only a bigger version of the iPhone, without the phone. That is the point, see, it's a bigger version of the iPhone.

Everything is simple and everything just works. Sure, there are the odd bugs that bug me, but nothing that would cause me to lose interest.

It's convenient and handy. Can be taken everywhere and I do take it everywhere I go. Here's a short list of the places I've used the device:

• On the sofa,
• In the garden
• in the train
• In a car
• In a flight
• On the john
• On the bed
• In the bath (note: take extra care not to drop it into the water)
• I'm sure you're seeing a pattern here...

I take the thing everywhere I go. In fact even when I sleep, it's always near my pillow. Before I'm dismissed as a weird person, a conclusion that, no doubt, several of you will hasten to do, I only take it everywhere because it's not out of place in any of the places I've taken it so far!

So what is it that's had me go ga-ga?

• the screen, the deliciously crisp screen. It's perfect for emails, browsing the net, watching movies and playing games. Everything is so clear and visible. Although it is little more than a slab of glass and plate at the back, it feels sturdy and incredibly well put together. There are no moving parts, which means panel gaps and rough edges are something the device has not heard of.

• iPad apps. As a policy, on my iPhone, I do not buy applications. Apps just shouldn't be bought. If app X costs £4.99 and can do 'n' number of things, I am quite happy to download 'n' free apps that in total perform 'n-1' functions. Until the iPad came along. I'm now happy to pay for apps that just look so awesome! In fact, I have a subscription to the Economist that I was all set to cancel. The reason for wanting to cancel the subscription was quite simple. It's a weekly magazine and I've had the subscription for approximately 8 months. There are roughly 32 unopened issues lying in wait for my father to come and read. You do the math. Just as I was about to hit the cancel subscription button on the website, along came the Economist iPad app and an announcement that subscribers to the tree killing edition get all areas access to the app included. I thought I'll give it a whirl and boy! I've read every issue that's come out since the app was launched! The paper one still comes in each week, but now I put it away unopened without even a pang of guilt!

When something looks as good as it does on the iPad, I ALMOST don't mind paying to get it!

• email. I don't need to say anymore, but neither computer based email clients, online email or mobile email can come anywhere near the email experience on the iPad.

• games. Specially driving games. These are supremely awesome to play and just so engaging!

• eBook reader. The Kindle can do one thing, which it does brilliantly. The iPad does several things brilliantly and this is one of them. Not only do you get a choice of e-readers to select from (iBooks, Kindle among others), you also get an amazing screen to read on! I don't even want to say anything about the blog reading experience on it. Suffice to say I wouldn't read blogs on any other device if I could avoid it. (not elaborating just saved readers around 15 minutes of time!)

• battery life. It just goes on and on! Even with my obsessive use, it goes roughly 2-3 weeks between charges. The one time I tried my darned best to make it run of out juice in one sitting, I ran out of juice before it did!

• engaging. On a recent trip to the US, I (of course!) took it with me and what a boon it was! We went on this road trip from San Francisco to San Diego with my sister's family. The niece is an active bubbly little bee and during the whole 10 hour drive, all she needed was a couple of hours to nap and unrestricted use of the iPad. She drew, drew some more, played scrabble, angry birds, cross-n-knots and what not! We didn't hear a peep from her the whole drive. 

I don't blame anyone for thinking, based on that I've said above, that I'm incapable of finding fault with the device. I can and I have. Big ones.

• eBook reader. It's a lousy eBook reader. Aha! I know your eyes just shot up a couple of centimetres on the screen to see the exact opposite of this sentence written on things I like. That's right, the very same advantage I found is my biggest disadvantage. The Kindle can do one thing and it does so brilliantly, the iPad, on the other hand is a master of all trades. It can do several things in a way most ordinary computers would struggle to do. When iOS 4 was released, it unleashed the beast within with multi-tasking. Now it is impossible to read a book on the iPad. Before one page is done with, one feels like playing a game, checking facebook, checking emails, reading blogs, random news items and the like. There's too much packed into this. I just cannot focus. On a Kindle or other dedicated reader, a book is all you can read and that's what one ends up reading. 

• Then there is the screen. Brilliant and amazing as it is, it just cannot hold water against the e-ink display of dedicated readers. As amazing as it is, it is just not easy on the eye. Much as I would love (and still do), I just cannot see myself curling up with the iPad and blasting my way through a book the way a paperback would do. The 'ol eyes would simply put their feet up and announce an early retirement. In a dark room, even the lowest power setting is too bright. 

Apart from two of its biggest advantages turning into its biggest disadvantages, I am smitten by this little stroke of genius and I know for sure that when Mr. S Jobs comes back and announces the iPad 2 and fixes the things he deliberately left out just to make sure iPad 2 can include them and be 'all new', I will miss the camera that would change the face of video chat.

Finally, I suppose huge thanks are due to the missus for uniting me with the pad... iPad :)

An argument goes up in smoke

I'm the sort of bloke who spends spare time reading about this and that. Nothing strange about it, but the 'this' and that I refer to is hardly entertaining. I like reading about obscure projects, products, reviews. I also follow cars across the world. One of the things being thrown about like rubbish out of a house in the Yewnited States of America is being carbon neutral. Never before has being neutral been so much in vogue.

I had seen the term being thrown around quite a bit over the past few years and I thought it was one of those crazy green things like you pay to have a sapling planted in the Amazon rain forest if you fart in the UK or something like that. Turns out it's that and a lot more. Pretty complex stuff this. To cut a long story short, there is a company that finds guys/gals who don't fart much and hooks them up with more gassy individuals and makes a tidy sum in between. One sets off the other and all that sort of thing. However, I'm not in the mood to cut long stories short and hence you get the whole 9 yards.

Let's start by setting the scene here. Person A, living in the UK wants to do the following:

• drive a car
• take a train
• drink coffee
• not freeze to death
• take a holiday
• switch on a light
• use the toilet
• watch TV
• use a bicycle (yes, cycling is not pollution free, not according to these nutters. The cycle is manufactured in a CO2 belching factory and talking of belching, I would say they've even successfully measured how much CO2 we emit while puffing and panting our way up a hill).
• you get the drift. 

Any activity performed by human beings is now contributing to global warming (err, sorry Climate Change) because we all emit tonnes and tonnes of CO2 each year and we're heating the place up (please don't ask me why London is still so cold, I do not know). Wanting to do something about climate change is a very noble and essential thought. Sure going green costs money and sure, it's not an easy thing to do.

Coming back to our case, getting Mr. A to be carbon neutral.

Scheme 1: The beginning

In the case above, person A would, in order to rectify the harm caused to the environment, walk/ride/drive/swim/fly down to the nearest IKEA, get a sapling, for a round sum of £15, that has been flown into the UK from Timbuktu and plant it in his garden. That sapling would then be tended to by A and in around 20 years become a tree that eats up CO2 and spits out Oxygen.

However, apart from IKEA, which flew the sapling in from T'tu no one else makes a profit. In steps the carbon trader Z, who, would tell Mr. A that in exchange for a 'paltry' £30, she will contact her middleman Y in United States, who would contact his middleman X in Mexico, who would contact his middleman W in Brazil, who will contact a farmer friend of his, a Mr. Poor Farmer, to plant a sapling in the Amazon rainforest, which would immediately offset the carbons emitted by A for the next 3 generations. Mr. A is very happy, feels his farsightedness has saved the planet and goes about smugly driving a gas guzzler to the grocery shop, which is around the corner. Mr. A need not worry about tending to the sapling, he need not worry about protecting the sapling from random creatures eating the tree that is supposed to save 3 generations of his, or from other random farmers clearing the very bit of forest this sapling has been planted in. He's paid money for something and has delegated his responsibility.

Scheme 2: Evolution

This went on for a while and then our friendly neighbourhood carbon trader Mr. Z saw her income drop, there were too many new entrants jumping onto the trading bandwagon, which pushed prices down and there is only so much of the Amazon that can be replanted without it resembling a paddy field.

One day, Ms. Z met her wizardly f(r)iends in the financial services sector, the ones that deal with derivatives and swaps. Soon after she saw them, she came back to her house and found it smelling of food that she had forgotten to put in the freezer. She immediately whipped out her can of room freshener and lo and behold! The smell vanished!

Ms. Z didn't come first in her university for no reason; she quickly put two and two together and came with the answer. Not four, but twenty two. Thinking out of the box and all that fancy stuff.

She jumped onto the internet and found a news item on Google about this factory in China, belonging to Hu Plc that suddenly became environmentally conscious and had replaced all its internal combustion power plants by thousands of labourers using a bicycle pump to blow air into a turbine, which would spin to generate electricity to power the factory (there was no green intention to the move, 1000 labours worked out cheaper than 1000 tonnes of coal, so the switch was made). She called that factory, rustled up the 5 words of Mandarin she had googled before the call and convinced them to calculate how much of CO2 they saved. They came up with a random number, let's say 1 million tonnes of CO2 per year. This made our heroine Z a happy camper.

She got busy with all her contacts, including our very own Mr. A and told them, "Earlier, you paid me money to do something, now I refuse to do anything. However, I do know a company that is doing something about the environment. Hu Plc is a responsible corporate. Realising they are polluting the environment, they have taken concrete, bold and pioneering steps to reduce their carbon footprint. Having invested millions of dollars in reducing their carbon emissions, they are keen in passing on any benefit they get from saving the environment. They have agreed to set off the saving they have achieved in carbon emissions against the CO2 you continue to irresponsibly emit by driving your car all over the country. So if you pay me £100 per year per car, in lieu of the CO2 you are emitting, I will use that money to buy carbon credits from Hu Plc, who, in essence are willing to bear the blame for YOUR pollution!" she finished with a tear in her eye.

Mr. A was suitably impressed by the fact that someone else now bears his cross and pays up. Z then pays Hu Plc a grand sum of £40 for the trouble it is taking to be named in the scheme. Z's profit had just shot up from £9.95 (£15 from Scheme 1, less commissions to Y in the US, X, W of £5, £0.2 each to the blokes in Mexico and Brazil, less £0.1 to Mr. Poor Farmer who actually planted the sapling) to a grand sum of £60. Hu Plc was very happy as it had not only saved money on not using coal, it had a 1000 labourers to exploit and also this dumb person Z from UK who thought the whole scheme was designed for environment friendliness and paid £40 for it! As for Mr. A, he was even happier than scheme 1 because his CO2 emissions were taken care of immediately as opposed to 20 years in the future, so he can continue to pollute and better still, not get affected by it, because someone else was not polluting for him! Win-win situation.

Scheme 3: The present

Scheme 2 seemed a good racket and Z saw money pouring into her coffers. More people starting the same racket didn't seem to affect profits adversely since more people were buying into the premise that getting someone else to be responsible for them was better than them having to take responsibility. However, the government and regulators didn't seem to be very helpful and insisted that the carbons NOT emitted be audited and checked to ensure that if a million tonnes was saved, not more than a million tonnes of carbon credit was sold on to offset not more than a million tonnes. In other words, supply of carbon credit became limited, which restricted sales. This pushed prices up, which was good, but profits were not adequate since the cost also went up. Z, after all, had a lifestyle to fund. She had become used to this lifestyle.

The next Eureka! moment for Z came when she had gone to the shoe shop for a spot of shopping.

As she used her credit card to pay for the £5,000 Gucci shoes she had just bought, she thought about when her credit card bill was due and if she needed to move some money around in the next few weeks to ensure money was in her account to pay the bill.

Then it hit her. "Of course, I use my credit card to buy things with money I don't have right now. I use future income to pay for my present lifestyle!" she thought. "In the same way, if I find a company that is GOING to invest in becoming green, I can use the carbon they are GOING to not be emitting and sell it to the losers who want to pollute more now!" She hurried home clutching her Gucci pumps, all the while drafting the next killer argument to put forward to the likes of Mr. A...so began her love affair with Carbon Futures trading, a scheme which not only generated a ton of money, but also removed the problem of limited supply of carbon credits. Pay for the present with the future. Win-win situation all over again!

The end.

I am all for going green and helping companies that genuinely want to go green for the good of the environment. We owe it ourselves and our future generations to save the precious planet we are in. We only have one place we can call home and that one place is increasingly becoming a hostile place to live, and that is largely due to us. However, I do not believe the solution is for ordinary citizens to simply pay money to pass on the responsibility of getting something done. That way we are just passing the buck around and not enough people do things for the betterment of the Earth. Saving the planet is an individual responsibility. We all have to play our part in it. If Mr. A planted the tree himself, he would feel attached to the tree, guard it from predators and ensure he does his darn best to see it grow into a large tree that helps clean up the environment around the very area he is polluting. If he pays someone to do it for him, the responsibility is just not there. It only shifts the onus of doing something to someone else. That, is my humble opinion.

Leftist arguments

Nope, not a politically motivated post. Now that we've got that out of the way...I'd indulged in some pond hopping over Christmas and decided to grace the US of A with a flying visit (pun totally intended!). After much uncertainty due to the white stuff. I'm not talking about the white stuff that lands one in jail, the white stuff that lands one in hospital. Wait, that white stuff also lands one in hospital, okay, I'm talking of snow.

We managed to sneak out of the British Isles through a small window of opportunity that the weather afforded us. Landing in the US, I couldn't help but notice one thing right away. The US likes to do things the exact opposite way to the rest of the world. This attitude hit me in the face right at the airport.

I'm usually accustomed to waiting in lines at the airports I've landed in for 'passport control', or immigration. Except for Indian airports, I'm always standing in line at the 'non-residents', 'immigrants' or foreigners queue. In the US I stood in the 'aliens' queue. I understand that the US is a world away from the rest of the world. Being a 10 hour flight from any place outside North America must have certainly contributed to this impression Americans have that they are a separate planet. I am, however, obliged to inform America that I have referred to the latest Google maps and NASA earth-from-space photography, both of whom are US registered entities, and America is still located on planet Earth. I have read somewhere that an alien is usually a person who isn't domiciled on the home planet, so, I humbly submit that I am not an alien, but a foreigner.

After entering planet United States of America, the excitement of the inter-planetary travel hit old bladder hard and I walked toward the 'rest-room' to empty said bladder. Out of sheer force of habit, I walked into the room on the left, only to get told off by one of the ladies who surprised me by being in the men's room. Turns out the ladies 'rest-room' was on the left and the blokes on the right, while I am used to vice-versa. Maybe I am being too picky or thick headed. Once I got into the right toilet and finished my business, I reached for the flush handle, on the right side of the cistern and didn't find one there. Of course, the handle was on the left! During the whole time I was in the States, I would religiously grope the right side of the flush before actually flushing. Having done my business and thoroughly washing my hand, I went out got into my BIL's car, and naturally it was left hand drive.

Now there is a school of thought that thinks left hand drive is the natural one and that the rest of the world is bonkers to drive on the other side. You will find that school to be mostly in America. There is another school of thought that things driving on the right side of the road is, well, not right. I am neutral about this and don't mind either, having lived in America aping Dubai and in Britain and its erstwhile colony. So this is not so much a gripe, but an observation.

The journey between the airport and home was completed without incident. On coming home, I found all switches to be in the on position, but no lights seemed to be on. So I assumed that for all its sophistication and industrial development, the place had a power cut. Then it hit me. On is off and off is on. What the world knows as the universal on position, is the off posish there.

All this got me thinking. Why would this happen? Why would everything, even the most mundane of things be the exact opposite of what the rest of the world considers normal? My thinking and groping later, I came to a plausible reason for this. When the old geezer Amerigo Vespucci did the hop across the ocean back in the 15th century, he must have been pretty peeved at matters the way they were done in Europe. He thought, "Right, I've now discovered my own continent. I'm going to do things my way here. And that way is to do things in a manner contrary to how the rest of those fools in Europe do it." And there folks, is how America came to be the way it is. I'm positive. Astute observers would no doubt, point out to me that in the 15th century, there were no cars, no electricity or immigration or indeed toilets. My explanation covers this too. The tradition established by Amerigo has been carried on by generations after him, who, no doubt, often visited Europe to make sure they were doing everything the Europeans didn't.

Happy New Year folks!