Having nothing better to blog about, and thinking my brother and his wife might like to see what I’ve spent their birthday present to me on — and what I didn’t, but thought about — please allow me to present a three-part series on my recent adventures in iTunes.

These are the apps I thought briefly about getting, but then didn’t. Not listed individually here are a handful of project management apps. The original idea was to find something that would allow me to better organize not just my ongoing writing projects, but any project. Then I realized I already had an app for that and went for Auteureist instead.

Although I did not find that these apps suited my personal needs, that doesn’t mean they’re necessarily bad apps. I’m talking about these here because I thought other people might find them useful.

Manuscript (Black Mana Studios, $7.99)
I was, as I’ve mentioned, looking at apps that were aimed at writing. This one looked really good, because it appeared to have lots of functionality for storing information about projects. Storyboards, notes, chapters — it even has some sort of connectivity to a dictionary/thesaurus and Wikipedia, and it will export your manuscript to Google Docs. $7.99 is quite a chunk for an app, though, and I actually didn’t want something to write a manuscript in. I don’t like writing long blocks of text on the iPhone. That will be better when I’m able to get my hands on an iPad, but at that point I’ll invest in an actual word processing app. I’d rather not duplicate that expense. As for the reference materials, I’ve already got other apps for that. The more I looked at it, the more I decided that something a little more pared-down would fit my needs better.

This American Life (Public Radio Exchange, $2.99)
I like TAL very much and half considered buying the app just to support the show. Ultimately, though, I decided I didn’t really need it. The archive of shows is (quite reasonably) only available for streaming unless you want to pay for an actual download; I can do that on my computer and, in fact, would rather do it on my computer. The TV episodes are not available free at all, that I can see, so that’s not a real draw for me. The bonus content is appealing, but not enough to make me buy the app. The one thing that did give me some pause is that the app offers the best interface for finding older episodes to listen for if you’re not sure what you’re looking for or when it aired. I could theoretically use the app to find an episode and then stream that episode on my computer. Realistically, though, I’m probably going to be doing well just to keep up with new episodes and probably wouldn’t wind up really using the search function in the app much. TAL is a great radio show and I’m sure that this app is probably great too. The app just isn’t for me personally.

Woman’s Day Cooking Assistant (Woman’s Day, Free)
Honestly, from the screenshots and the write-up, it looks like this is probably a great app if you’re looking for a cooking and recipe sort of thing. And it’s FREE! How can you beat that? It’s got simple recipes (that come with nutrition facts, apparently, if you’re tracking that sort of thing), info on ingredients, tips, a cooking time calculator, etc., etc. It sounds lovely. The only reason I didn’t get it is that I’ve done the cooking app thing before. I inevitably wind up forgetting about it and not using it, and it just sits around cluttering up my iPhone. So I thought I should probably give it a pass, even if it does sound really helpful.

dSLR Photography Toolkit for Dummies (Skava, $0.99)
I’ve been on a photography kick lately. You might have noticed. I saw this and was initially excited. …Until I realized that I wouldn’t use it. Because I just plain don’t need most of its checklists and tutorials, really. It would be nice to have some tips and tricks and whatever, but I don’t know that I need an app for that so much as the half-dozen podcasts I’ve recently subscribed to. As for the shoot diary, right now I’m probably not recording half the information a “serious” art photographer would be about my pictures, but this is not a case where having an app for that is going to increase the likelihood that I’ll change my ways. I know it’s only 99 cents, but I’m just not convinced that it’s going to be that helpful to me.

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Having nothing better to blog about, and thinking my brother and his wife might like to see what I’ve spent their birthday present to me on — and what I didn’t, but thought about — please allow me to present a three-part series on my recent adventures in iTunes.

Over the Rhine, Live From Nowhere Volume 1
You can just sort of make up a bunch of fangirl blather about how much I love Over the Rhine and put it in here. Got it? Ready to continue? Okay. So we’ve got pretty much every studio album they’ve recorded, but until recently I’d sort of overlooked a lot of the live stuff. Volumes 1 and 4 are (to date) the most heavily-loaded with my favorite tracks; I pre-ordered Volume 4 before its release, and now that I’ve got a little extra credit lying around I’ve picked up Volume 1 as well. Having listened to several of the tracks already, I think I prefer Volume 4′s more polished, jazzier presentation — but this is good too.

Tiesto, “Adagio for Strings”
One of the fun things about Facebook is the random crap that people post. One of those random things was a song Bri posted that happens to fit just perfectly in the little niche of my musical interest labeled “trance”. It’s been on my to-get list for a while and I’m only just now getting around to it.

Oranger, “Mr. Sandman”
Okay. Speaking of guilty pleasures — Vampire Diaries. Yes, yes, I know. But seriously, it’s turned into a really good show. (Even if they could, if they felt like it, lay off the hiatus thing. March 25? Seriously? We just had a hiatus!) Sometimes some really fun music pops up in the soundtrack, too. This electric cover of “Mr. Sandman” was featured in the episode with the ’50′s-themed dance.

Keri Noble, “Pages of My Letters”
From TV to radio. This track was featured on the most recent episode of This American Life, in the act break following a story involving a dying mother who wrote letters to be delivered annually to her then-teenaged daughter and the impact those letters had on the daughter’s life and relationship with her father (who was charged with delivering them). It’s a sweet, sad sort of song, and I couldn’t help but like it.

Selena Cross, “Silence”
Found through the “other customers also purchased” part of the iTunes page for Keri Noble’s CD that contained “Pages of My Letters”. I gather it’s often used for a lyrical selection in dance routines in competition, from the comments left about it. I can see why; it’s soft and emotive, and seems well-suited to such an application.

Rose Berlin, “Coraline”
Voltaire, “Come Sweet Death”
Ego Likeness, “You Better Leave the Stars Alone”
I was actually looking up Tapping the Vein, though more for the aforementioned “other customers also purchased” function than anything, just to see if I could find something new. And, er, well, I sorta did, but not the way I’d intended. One of the albums that came up for Tapping was something called “Where’s Neil When You Need Him?“, a collection of songs inspired by the work of Neil Gaiman. I had three bucks left on the gift card. Intrigued by the concept, I chose three songs that sounded good and called it an evening.

And, as with the apps, stuff I purchased on my Christmas money:

Fall Out Boy, “I Don’t Care”
I got hooked on this one through Rock Band and was stunned to discover that our Fall Out Boy collection didn’t include it. So I fixed that.

Dar Williams, “Blue Light of the Flame”
I heard this song for the first time when Jen and I went to see Dar play at the Bluebird last year. I’d gotten hooked on her music a few years back, but then not kept up with her career; this track was from one of the discs I’d missed. Although I don’t often buy whole albums anymore (OtR is an exception), I did want this beautiful, delicate track.

A3, “Woke Up This Morning”
You probably know this one as “the Sopranos theme song”. I have never in my life seen an episode of The Sopranos, but so many other shows have done parodies of and homages to the opening title that the music has become quite familiar. The more I listen to it, the more I like it.

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Having nothing better to blog about, and thinking my brother and his wife might like to see what I’ve spent their birthday present to me on — and what I didn’t, but thought about — please allow me to present a three-part series on my recent adventures in iTunes.

Storyteller (Muon Van, $1.99)
I was looking for writing-related apps. This one is for idea-generating when writer’s block sets in. I don’t know if it will actually be of much practical use. I think I’m likely to find some (many?) of its suggestions faintly ridiculous or unsuited to my projects. It seemed like the sort of thing that could just plain be fun anyway, though.

Auteureist (VisualNewt, $5.99)
This one gave me a little more pause, because six bucks is getting a bit into the high end for apps and I wasn’t totally sure whether this was what I wanted or not. I thought it might be helpful to have a way to organize my writing projects, especially now that I’ve got two finished NaNoWriMo drafts plus at least one unfinished draft and an idea that just plain won’t go away. I thought I might just get a project-management app, which would be less of a single-tasker and more able to organize other projects as well. In the end, though, I realized all I wanted there was a to-do list, and I’ve already got one of those if I’d bother to use it like that. So I went for Auteureist and its database of characters, locations, etc. instead. I’ve already started playing with it some, and will probably post a review at some point.

And a few that I got with my Christmas money:

Photogene (Omar Shoor, $1.99)
I was looking for an image editing app. This one seemed the most likely; it came well-recommended, and it had all the basic functionality I was looking for. It’s not anything fancy, but it will allow some adjustment to things like exposure and crop. I wouldn’t use it for anything I was going to print, but then I wouldn’t use my iPhone’s camera for that either, so not a big downside.

Noise Blaster (Omar Shoor, $0.99)
All this one does is remove the noise that the iPhone’s camera puts into low-light photos. It does that relatively well. Well, 99 cents worth of well, at least. Shrug.

Photo/FX (The Tiffen Company, $2.99)
This is essentially a large collection of filters and effects. I’ll admit that there are several I don’t use, because they overdo the effect or because I just don’t really like them (most notably the “Pencil” effect and the “Color Spot” set), but even with those exceptions there are still enough to make it worth the three bucks.

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I keep forgetting to keep up the linking to other places I’m writing. Over on my reading journal, I’ve been speeding through the Thursday Next series by Jasper Fforde, having picked up the first at the library and subsequently borrowed the rest from Dad. You can read my posts on the first two without fear of spoilers, but by the third it’s becoming impossible to say much about it without dropping at least minor spoilers for the first two. You’ve been warned.
The Eyre Affair
Lost in a Good Book
The Well of Lost Plots

I suspect I may also have forgotten to link to more minor updates about The Mysteries of Udolpho and Sandman, as well as the the mass update when I realized I hadn’t written in it forever.

And I just never actually put up anything about Terry Pratchett’s Small Gods, while I was reading it or after I finished, for what reason I can’t imagine.

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This just in from Wired.com’s GeekDad blog:

How to Raise Racist Kids

Step One: Don’t talk about race. Don’t point out skin color. Be “color blind.”

Step Two: Actually, that’s it. There is no Step Two.

What I’m getting from the article is that basically, when researching a book, some people found that trying to raise non-racist kids by teaching them that skin color doesn’t matter doesn’t actually work. The issue, if I’m understanding correctly, is that this method of “colorblind” upbringing is usually accomplished by simply not talking about race or skin color. Although my initial knee-jerk reaction was kind of “um… excuse me?”, I can kind of understand it when you look at it like this. Simply not talking about things doesn’t work for other touchy subjects; why should it here? As with anything, if you don’t talk to your kids they will form their own opinions. Maybe you’ll get lucky and that will mean they’ll decide that people with skin colors different from their own are just as intelligent and deserving as they are. Maybe they’ll decide otherwise. Maybe, if you constantly shush them when they point out that someone has a different skin color, they’ll come away with the impression that a different skin color is shameful.

If you want to be sure they get the message, in other words, you have to give them the message in the first place and not just leave them to fill in the blanks. If you want them to appreciate diversity, show them diversity rather than trying to pretend it doesn’t exist. Okay. That makes sense.

I think what annoyed me, though, was this paragraph:

We’re very comfortable now talking to our kids about gender stereotypes: we tell our kids that women can be doctors and lawyers. Heck, Barbie can be a computer engineer! What Bronson and Merryman point out is that we should say the same thing about race: doctors can be any skin color. A (half-)black man can be President. Black people can be very cool geeks.

I am never. Ever. Going to say to Natalie, “Women can be doctors and lawyers.” I think I see sort of where this is going, but I don’t think this was the way to phrase it at all. Making a bald statement like that sounds like women have been somehow granted permission, like they weren’t worthy to be doctors and lawyers before but now they have been judged worthy. Which is… sort of a way you could describe the way women in those fields have been more accepted as time goes on, I guess, but phrasing it like that just makes me feel like I’m expected to be grateful for this liberation, this freedom to be judged based on my talent and not what I’ve got between my legs, when that’s the way it should’ve been in the first place. If you’re going for looking at the social change that has led to this point, that’s fine I guess, but just saying “women can do this now, and before they couldn’t” is a vast oversimplification of the situation. Similarly, I feel like saying, “Black people can be doctors,” is rather a condescending and oversimplified way to put it. And so I won’t.

(As for female computer engineers — I’m so glad we have Barbie to validate our existence. Never mind that women have been in computer science pretty much since there was a computer science field to be in. Don’t get me wrong; I think it’s cool that Computer Engineer Barbie exists. Her existence has no bearing on the validity of “computer engineer” as a career choice for women, though, and I resent her being held up as some kind of standard by which we can judge women’s options. Somehow Grace Hopper managed without a Computer Engineer Barbie, as did Ada Lovelace before her. Sorry. I’ll stop. This is irritating me all out of proportion to the actual offense.)

What I’d much rather do is make sure that Natalie understands the concept of diversity. Teach her about the histories these sorts of struggles have, and about people who broke down the barriers excluding women/blacks/etc. from various fields. Help her learn about and appreciate cultures other than her own, whether that means talking about the Deep South or Ireland or Vietnam. Don’t avoid pointing out differences; rather, make them a point of interest and curiosity, a positive thing rather than a shameful one.

We are not a homogenous society, and even less a homogenous world. There’s no reason to pretend that we are. There’s also no reason to act like we’re bestowing permission for people to follow their dreams and their talents, though.

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(I clearly need to post more often; I hadn’t realized that I hadn’t done so since the last photography-assignment stuff I did.)

This week’s assignment: Fruits and Vegetables. Feeling restless and creative, but having practically no fruit or veggies in the house prior to the weekly grocery trip, I settled for some grapes piled into a metal prep/condiment cup. The afternoon sunlight coming in our kitchen window lit them up like jewels.

Click here for my actual submission, or here to see a small gallery of the shots I had to choose from.

I like how these came out a bit better than last week’s cookies. I feel like there’s more variety there, and a little more creativity (I hope). Now I just have to figure out what to do for the “Life” challenge this week, and be on the lookout for a “Love” shot for the Weekend Challenge…

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This week’s assignment is “Food Photography: Desserts”. This is the first actual assignment (as opposed to Weekend Challenge, which is a little more casual) I’ve participated in. My entry isn’t spectacular — I like it, but in the end it’s just a picture of a cookie, not much special about it. Still, every shot is practice, right? Doing something is better than doing nothing, even if that “something” isn’t as stellar as it could be.

Most of the shots for the assignment are of some coconut macaroons I made as a birthday treat, sitting on a cooling rack in the bright afternoon sun. There are also a very few shots of what appears to be a cupcake at the end of the gallery. These are included because they technically fit the theme, but I actually took them for this week’s entry to the “Life” contest. I don’t generally make a big deal about birthdays (not even “big” ones like this one), but they do feel all wrapped up in the concept of “life” to me, marking as they do our progress through the term of our life. Or, at the very least, I wasn’t coming up with anything else and didn’t want to miss a chance to enter, yes?

This one was better for creativity, not necessarily in the composition but in the staging of the photo. We didn’t have any cupcakes or icing, and I didn’t really feel like making any. So I had to come up with something else that would stand in photographically — and then set the stage the way I wanted it as well. Much different from the macaroons, where I just had to grab a camera and take a photo of what was already there! It turned out to be an exercise in editing as well, as one of the better-composed shots came out with some odd refraction in it that I had to Photoshop out. (Thank goodness for the plain black background and the Heal tool.)

Links:
“Desserts” Assignment Entry
“Life” Contest Week 2 Entry
“Desserts” Assignment Gallery

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Over at SparkPeople, I’m hitting a brick wall. Over and over again. Because what else can I do?
Aaaand There’s the Down-Swing

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