Author: Rob Attrell

Okay, I’ve gotten a lot of good feedback about the first hangout, and though I know there are a few kinks and issues, as well as some unfortunate timing for a couple of people, I’m very pleased with how it went, and for those of you who are interested, the link to the video on YouTube is right here, and I’ve embedded it here as well. I’m going to try out a few more things in the meantime to make the information more available and relevant, and it also ended up showing off a few of the more interesting features of hangouts, a marquee feature of Google+. Ideally there would be a way to annotate the video to fast forward to specific topics, but really what it comes down to is participation from you guys. Whether it’s asking questions beforehand, or coming and asking during the hangout, on video or through some form of messaging, it makes it much more interesting and compelling if you guys give your say. In that light, I’m going to make a little informal poll to see if there is any interest on a specific topic, as well as to see if there is a time that works better for a larger audience. I might also take it upon myself to do a few shorter videos in the meantime, on more specific, easily digestible topics.

Thanks guys, I really appreciate hearing from you. I will keep everyone updated!

Last year, upon the release of iMessage, I described and suggested to friends a method wherein users of iPhone and iPad/Mac computers could receive messages on both their phone and other device, so long as they used their email address with iMessage, since sending an iMessage to a phone number only resulted in the iPhone getting the message. An iMessage email address could be tied to any number of devices, and messages would be synced across all of the devices.

And a year ago, iMessages that were sent using email addresses always seemed to be somewhat delayed in reaching the iPad as compared to the iPhone. While at the time it seemed like that was just a quirk with the iPad and iMessages not being configured quite well for them, I have to change my opinion on iMessages from my previous recommendation.

As of the most recent update to Mac OS X, you can receive iMessages on your Mac from a phone number as well, so long as that phone number is associated with an iPhone using the same Apple ID. The same is true of FaceTime, the Apple video chat application. Same thing goes for iPads as well, phone numbers can now be used to have messages sent to all of your devices.

Starting new conversations from your phone number is asure way to ensure your messages will sync across devices.

If you are like me, and think that having two devices at which you can be reached is silly, you should definitely use your phone number as the main hub for all of your messages. While there still seems to be a delay on iMessages to email addresses on iPad or Mac, no such delay is present for phone numbers. Now, I understand that for some people, having your text messages show up on your computer might be cause for concern, especially if you tend to leave your computer in places where other people might come across it. Text messages are generally considered to be one of the more private forms of virtual communication, but if you aren’t concerned so much about getting outed by someone reading your conversations (most probably do tend to be fairly vanilla), I would seriously recommend doing this. Really, it is just bringing us one step closer to a universal messaging system.

Read receipts are really handy!

Finally, there is an option in iOS messages wherein you can send read receipts to the people you iMessage with. This is a very nice option to offer to the people you talk to, and while I have spoken to people who really don’t like it, if you think about how often you wonder with a text message whether or not your message has actually been read, you can understand how nice a feature this really is.

Welcome indeed!

Okay, so I have been looking forward to reviewing new toys I get, and since I was sitting at my computer while opening my new, 4th generation iPad with wifi and cellular connectivity, I decided to take some pictures of the unboxing process, so I can discuss the iPad, how it has changed in the new generation and what to expect from the new version. I should point out, I owned the 3rd generation iPad from launch day, and it has been my favourite thing since that at day.

The baby is going to get all the attention.

Most people are extremely confused by the new iPad, because the iPad 2 is still on sale in Apple stores. I will admit that if you don’t follow the news, it is pretty difficult to understand what is the newest product. Even apple store employees have trouble explaining this. If the progression of iPad naming was linear and consistent, you would have four iPads all named by their generation of release (1st, 2nd, 3rd and now 4th generation iPads all in order). The problem arose when after coming out with the iPad, they called the 2nd iPad the “iPad 2”. When they introduced the 3rd generation iPad, they went back to the standard naming convention, and dropped the numeral in the title. So for the last 2 years, you could buy the iPad 2 (the old iPad) or the iPad (the new iPad, which could have been called the iPad 3 and now iPad 4, but is just called iPad). The iPad 2 saves you $100, but is now 2 generations and almost 2 years old. It has a very low resolution screen and runs on an outdated processor. It is well worth it to spend the extra $100 to upgrade.

First, opening the box, you see that everything is perfectly laid out to protect the iPad and its accessories, but also to make it easy and convenient to remove them. Apple always goes to great lengths to make every step of the opening process easy and simple.

After removing the iPad from its protective plastic sheath, starting up the iPad gives you a glimpse of its beautiful, high resolution screen. The process of setting up the iPad requires you to get it onto the Internet to activate it, but aside from that and signing into your iCloud account, the process only takes a few minutes. Soon you will be having fun playing with your iPad!

The 4th generation iPad, on the outside, has very little visible difference from its predecessor. There are, however, several important differences that will have an impact on your everyday use. The only visible, and most important difference, is the lightning connector on the bottom. This is probably the main reason this iPad was released, because it brings all of the newest generation of apple products up to the same connector. This connector is 80% smaller than the old 30-pin connector, is reversible, and does seem to allow for some faster charging than the old connector. Additionally, on the outside, the iPad AC adapter was improved, going from a 10W charger to a 12W one, an increase of 20%, which should allow for faster changing as well.

Another difference that will actually be visible is that the front facing camera was been updated to a much higher resolution, so that you will actually be able to take front facing photos and partake in video chats without having an incredibly blurry face. This is noticeable right away and will allow for a huge improvement in your experience.

The processor in the new iPad is also twice as fast as the previous generation, which definitely makes day to day tasks and loading programs much faster. Additionally, on the inside, the cellular and wifi radios are improved in order to allow the iPad to connect to LTE networks in more places around the world, while wifi performance is doubled compared to the old generation.

Start using iPad: don’t mind if I do!

Lightning!

Other than those differences, this iPad is pretty similar to the old one, and you definitely shouldn’t worry about it if you have the 3rd generation iPad, you are not missing much. I expect the next generation iPad will have a form more like the iPad mini, and should be the upgrade you hold out for. Whether or not that happens on the old release schedule (around March) or the new schedule (almost a year from now in October), any retina iPad will do just fine until the next upgrade cycle.

See “Shortcuts” near the bottom.

 I am hoping to do lots of these little guys, since they are pretty useful and only take 5 minutes. In preparation for my first Google+ Hangout on Air on Saturday (around 1PM), I would like to give you a taste of the kind of little things you can expect to learn in 2 days time. This little trick isn’t that new, but I have found it to be extremely useful, even if you only use it for this one purpose.

Basically, on iPhone (or iPod or iPad), under Settings> General> Keyboard, right at the bottom is an area titled “Shortcuts”. This allows you to create shorthand phrases for things you commonly type into your phone (for me, that is my long, annoying email address). As you can see, I have set it up so that when I type the characters ratt into anywhere on the phone, my email will pop up as an “auto-correct” type popup. Simply hitting space, or pressing on the popup itself will complete the entire address, saving you a lot of switching between keyboards for the various characters needed for email addresses. This is something I use every single day, and that everyone should know about.

I hope you can make good use of it! I am expecting to get together a short instructional post about signing up for a Google+ account, which will be required to actually participate in my Hangout, this should be available in the next 24 hours. However, if you are impatient, you can visit plus.google.com, or download the Google+ app from either your iDevice or your Android phone/tablet, and follow the instructions, which are pretty straightforward. If you already have a Google (or Gmail) account, things couldn’t be simpler, all you have to do is accept the terms for Google+ and you are ready to go.

Okay guys, I have thought about this enough, it is time to act. I have decided on a time for the inaugural vodcast I mentioned in a previous post here. If anybody would like to actively participate (i.e. join the video chat directly) I will be coming up with a set of instructions on how to do so in the next day or two, but if you have a Google+ account already (that you should, but never do, use) all you will need to do is find the link at the appropriate time and you can join the hangout. I will also be posting a link to Facebook and Twitter for those of you who don’t feel like being in front of a camera, but who would still like to participate, so that you can watch and comment, or ask as many questions as you can come up with.

Though this chat will be broadcasting live through Google+, it will also be up on YouTube during and after the fact, so even if you don’t want to join Google+, you don’t have to miss out.

As for the topic of the show, I am expecting very little participation right off the bat, so I will have a few topics prepared, but for the time being my focus is intended to be all about smartphones. Be it features, choices, prices, options, tricks, tips, anything under the sun, I will open up the floor to questions anybody might have on their current or future cell phone. I will be taking questions by email ([email protected]), through the Facebook comment thread (robert.attrell), by SMS or iMessage (613.255.3311), via Twitter (@RobAttrell) or Google+ (see profile at right of this post), and of course you can always join the Google+ hangout itself and say hello, to ask your question in person.

Even Barack Obama has done one of these.

Currently I am looking to do this on Saturday afternoon, around perhaps 1 PM. I will update if that changes or if it needs minor adjustments. Those of you who have expressed an interest in helping me with this or participating on-air should let me know if they have anything they would like to add. I am also open to suggestions for new future topics, I would like to branch into science-based topics as well. I would really love to hear from all of you, after all, there are no stupid questions.

I will update everything as events warrant it, and I look forward to you all seeing me Saturday!

Why I would like to be a research scientist:

The jobs I feel this title encompasses includes (but is not at all limited to) doctor, astronaut, researcher, science officer, engineer.

Since I was a very young child, I have always been fascinated with Science. It is a field of extremely useful and relevant insight into the human condition, and can help us simultaneously understand the smallest bacterium and the largest galaxy. The fact that all of the same rules apply anywhere in the universe is a very humbling idea, but also a very powerful one. Science can be used to peer into the deepest, darkest reaches of the universe, or inside ourselves down to the atomic scale, yet the same basic set of facts hold true.

For most of my life, in fact in my whole living memory, I have been extremely curious about pretty much every scientific domain. Whether that is chemistry (which ended up being my primary field of study at the post-secondary level), physics, biology, medicine, astronomy, or geology, I have always found myself captivated by the joy of collecting knowledge and information.

Growing up, and in most cases to this day, what I learn lines up with what I already know, validating the current knowledge base. But this is not where the joy of science comes in. I think that is a common misconception of “civilians” when discussing science as a method. When something comes along that flies in the face of what we have agreed is the best explanation for a given phenomenon, we have to alter the theory so that it fits all evidence. This is not a failure of the scientific method; it is actually its most wonderful feature. If everything that happened in the universe fit perfectly into our existing knowledge base, the world would be an incredibly boring place. There could be little or no scientific or technological innovation if we learned everything there was to know about the world, or if new experiments ceased to give us new information about our existence. If science had run up against that wall at any point in history, society as a whole would be much worse off.

The absolute most wonderful part of science is its ability to see past political lines, beyond personal opinion or celebrated intelligence. For example, in the Middle Ages, or perhaps a little earlier, it was commonly thought that the world was flat and that that the earth was the center of the whole universe. This in itself is a very egotistical idea, but nevertheless. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that view at the time, and scientists around (umm aflat?) the world, given their evidence, had no choice but to think that. However, the problem arose when scientists like the famous Galileo Galilei started to encounter evidence to show that the Earth had to be round, and that it was very likely that the Sun was actually in the center of our little universe (the solar system). This evidence was merely the scientific method at work, and required modification of the existing theories about our world, but certain parties considered it heresy and (infamously) banished him to house arrest.

The point of this story is that in order to be a scientist, at least in the strictest definition, you really have to be able to put the truth above all preconceptions and personal notions. I think of myself as being ideal for this type of work because I care deeply about understanding the universe the way it is, not fitting it into some template of prior expectations. In this way I am more than capable of being objective in the face of unexpected results in any part of my life. I am always very excited to let the scientific method determine the outcome of experiment.

In the course of learning about chemistry at the post-secondary level, I have come to realize that none of the sciences are really so different once you understand one. So while I have training in chemistry, and specifically in solid-state NMR and computational methods thereof, my training has also prepared me to learn and understand any of the sciences. Over the course of a four year university degree, we are taught to read up on scientific literature, ask any questions we have, and then enter into a lab environment to perform specific experiments based on the learned concepts. In general, extensive training on these concepts is not given, and experiments in these labs are rarely done more than once in the same way. By this logic, for a competent scientist, an experiment which holds interest for the experimenter can easily be accomplished with minimal training, regardless of the specific scientific discipline.

All of this considered, I believe I have the experience, know-how and specific skills and aptitudes to be an excellent research scientist.

I would like to dedicate this post to Matthew Inman, creator of the Oatmeal.

He wrote a really wonderful and beautiful post today about writing on the internet. You can see it at the link above, but basically it outlines why he loves writing and cartooning and comicing on the internet. It really is a fantastical place once you get to know people and people start to get to know you. Of course, Matt is a major success story, very few people can actually be successful doing what he does.

The great thing that happened to me as I was reading it, though, is that I found that probably the best and best known writer on the internet encounters all of the same problems and nuances of writing as I do. From spending hours thinking about a topic and writing nothing, to waking up at 3 AM and pouring your heart out, you do what you have to when the mood strikes. I would absolutely love to get the chance to write professionally on the Internet, but I’m not quite there yet. I hope that one day soon though, that I would be so lucky as to get the chance to do what I am so passionate about as my primary job.

That is a pretty basic human desire, and we should all get to do it, at least for a little while in our lives. For the time being though, I am going to keep writing about what I love, and I hope you all enjoy reading what I have to say. I definitely have a few ideas cooking, and I intend to see them through.

Do go read the comic I’m talking about at the Oatmeal though, here’s the link:

(The Oatmeal)

In my continual hunt for reasonable, grown-up employment, I find I continue to bump up against a ceiling which is probably the only step on the road to adulthood I was never warned about. Growing up, I was given to understand that in order to become a functioning adult, I should go through school, toeing the line and staying out of trouble. If I did that, and got good grades while doing so (which really isn’t that difficult if you stay out of trouble), it was said that I could go to university. The land of academia, especially of the post-secondary variety, was my biggest aspiration in my mid-teens. What I forgot to consider, though, is that there is life beyond academic endeavours.

Though while I was growing up I considered many professions, including but not limited to lawyer, doctor and astronaut. I wrote these off, as I had no interest in pursing a career whose status is such that a high degree of competition would mean that my enjoyment of the work would be lessened by having to spend perhaps years in a cut-throat environment where nice guys like me are sure to finish last, regardless of aptitude or intelligence. I decided that given my enjoyment of the sciences (chemistry in particular), doing research to further my understanding of the world around us would be an excellent intellectual pursuit. I attended university in those interests, satisfied my curiosity, and completed all the tasks set by my various professors. When it came time to finish my studies and leave university, all indications were that it would be reasonable to delay my exit from academia for a while, as the economy, and therefore the job market, were not conducive to finding relevant employment. Since I had forged a few connections with faculty on campus, I was able to arrange a master’s degree, even though from an academic standpoint I was a pretty big risk for professors using their funding.

Over the course of my master’s work, which was a follow-up to research I began during my undergraduate degree, I became disenfranchised with the focus of my studies, solid-state NMR. I maintained a scientific curiosity, but had very little interest in pursuing this kind of fundamental research as a career. I arranged to wrap up my research and complete the degree in a little over 12 months, it was not worth leaving at that point in the degree, given that I had already handed a few thousand dollars to the university. In the end, I was able to finish the degree in 13 months, and felt confident my background in research and evident love of science would qualify me for any number of jobs.

While I was working in the lab during my undergraduate and master’s research, I also developed a love for computers, computer science, and technology in general. This is a passion which sticks with me to this day, and in fact has only grown. The field of computer science, and the myriad opportunities it holds, are also of great interest to me in terms of careers.

What I have found, more than anything so far since I left home 6 years ago, is that given a small amount of necessary training, I can accomplish pretty much anything I set my mind to. However, you cannot get hired to do “anything”, and therefore I am having real trouble narrowing my career focus. The resulting uncertainty is extremely disconcerting to me, my family and my close friends, but the fact is I would prefer not to actively exclude any particular career, especially if I can work at an interesting company, where I can perform a variety of tasks and would be given some free rein to work on things which I consider interesting and productive. I am certain a career of this nature is out there somewhere, it’s just a matter of finding it.

Wish me luck!